revere | December 13, 2006New 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 scientists during the scientific revolution of the 18th century. Even before the appearance of scientific journals, there were local or regional meetings, where scientist would gather periodically and exchange ideas and information through presentations, debate and discussion. These meetings are still…
revere | December 13, 2006Again, 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 St. Jude's Children's Hospital in Memphis, is now reporting there are much higher H5N1 viral loads in the upper respiratory tract of birds than in the intestines. This is work done jointly with Albert Osterhaus in The Netherlands. It has led to changes in recommendations for detecting the virus in…
revere | December 12, 2006The 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 overall health and longevity. But the same mechanism that brought a healthy substance efficiently to large numbers of people could also be the means to distribute poison to the community and the periodic outbreaks of waterborne diseases was the result. A water supply is a long lever and small changes…
revere | December 12, 2006Many 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 we only have room for a few of these worries. But some people worry about all of them as part of their jobs. Actuaries -- the professionals who help insurance companies estimate their risks and what to charge for premiums -- do this for a living.
While nanotechnology and bird flu are as different…
revere | December 11, 2006A 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 article:
What Ever Happened To Bird Flu? (Forbes)
After pandemic fear, experts wonder: What happened to bird flu? (Houston Chronicle)
After pandemic panic, experts wonder: What happened to bird flu?(Santa Barbara News-Press)
Despite panic, bird flu pandemic hasn't appeared (Minneapolis Star-Tribune…
revere | December 11, 2006Compared 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 host cell's extensive protein making machinery and doesn't use its own. But we are still learning about those eleven proteins, what their role is, how they work and even what they look like. A paper that just appeared in Nature (.pdf, subscription only) is the first to reveal what one of these…
revere | December 10, 2006Rodney 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 cameras and asked, "People, I just want to say, you know, can we all get along?" Maybe we should send Mr. King to China to ask the same question of scientists squabbling about whether there was an unreported new strain of bird flu (H5N1) widely circulating there:
"Instead of having a battle in the media…
revere | December 10, 2006I 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 last minute holiday shopping is a good time for some levity. I suppose it depends a little on your sense of humor whether you think some of this utter, complete, total and idiotic nonsense is levity or not, but I'm an optimist. The toilet is half empty rather than half full:
The recent furor over U…
revere | December 9, 2006You 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 outbreak has resulted in the slaughter of some 240 million birds. In 2005 it burst out of Asia and spread into Europe, the Middle East and Africa. So even without the "other shoe" dropping -- a change in the virus to allow easy transmissibility from human to human -- the damage already done is immense…
revere | December 8, 2006We'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 The Questionable Authority know this only too well. His wife Nicole is serving in Iraq now. Many of you know Mike as the blogger here who put up the detailed guide to how we can be heard on behalf of The Tripoli 6. Now Mike is asking for our help for another worthy cause, the families of service…
revere | December 8, 2006With 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 Mongkol Na Songkhla announced at the opening ceremonies Thailand was determined to "get it together":
Authorities launched a clean-up campaign after randomly checking 6,149 public toilets across 12 of Thailand's 76 provinces in March and finding that 90 per cent did not pass the standards for…
revere | December 8, 2006Part 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 only emergency patients to be admitted to hospitals during the 2003 SARS outbreak in Toronto would not be enough to handle the flood of patients expected during even a mild flu pandemic, a new study has found.
[snip]
"The [various governments' pandemic flu] plans are quite comprehensive, but the…
revere | December 7, 2006I 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 links to the case (McCormack is the State Department spokesperson):
[Reporter's] QUESTION: There's a scientific study published in -- by a British magazine today that would seem to set a scientific basis that those accused in the Libya HIV trial could not be guilty just because of findings that…
revere | December 7, 2006There 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). Overproduction of Cox-2 can cause pain and fever, which frequently accompany reaction to infection. The problem is that treatment of B-cells with inhibitors of the enzyme (Cox-2 inhibitors) also markedly affected the ability of the B-cell to produce antibody. What are some Cox-2 inhibitors? Aspirin, Ibuprofen…
revere | December 6, 2006We 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 was extraordinary and spread quickly to the blogosphere on both the left and right sides of the political spectrum. The campaign to save the six health workers began with a strongly worded editorial in Nature and spread via the science blogosphere to the wider science and human rights organizations…
revere | December 6, 2006Four 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 means they don't really know the true level of bird flu. The two-day conference that opens Wednesday in Mali, and follows similar international meetings in China and Austria, will focus on preparedness as the next bird flu season approaches, including marshaling financial and other resources to…
revere | December 5, 2006I 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 difficult to use when background noise reaches about 80 decibels ? the same as a busy street. These surrounding sounds can then drown out audio information that is crucial to an accurate diagnosis.
Street noise, nothing. How about the ground floor of an inner city hospital of some repute in a ward…
revere | December 5, 2006After 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 blamed. Bird conservationists are fearful that pinning the virus's travel on migrating wild birds will result in destruction of their habitats and crucial stops on their flyways, while the public health community has tended to be more concerned, as has the commercial poultry industry.
The bird folks have…
revere | December 4, 2006Years 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 manufacturers trying to regain ground lost to increasingly popular wine by launching new products with health benefits. These include vitamin beers, such as Stampede Light, which contains B-vitamins, folic acid and folate, as well as Germany's Karlesberg
Braueri functional beers aimed at women, made with…
revere | December 4, 2006It 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 Office:
Source: WHO Western Office for the Regional Pacific
There are two principal reasons I can think of for this difference in pattern, and my guess is both are operating simultaneously. The first has to do with what epidemiologists call observation bias. Death from acute respiratory failure in…