revere | November 12, 2006As a sometime modeler myself it now makes my heart sink when I read about a "new" model that tells us that such and such is going to happen with avian influenza. Box's adage that all models are wrong but some models are useful is apt, but telling which ones are useful is becoming so difficult we'll need a model to help us do it. Two cases in point: a new economic model from Australia telling us not worry, the economic effects won't be that bad; and another airline model, this one that says if we shut down international air travel we'll gain time in the US -- enough time, according to the…
revere | November 12, 2006It's the Sunday after the midterm elections in the United States. The American people have had enough of the Iraq War. Finally. So here are two poems, the first from Stephen Crane (1871-1900); the second, from Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956):
A Learned Man Came to Me Once (Stephen Crane)
A learned man came to me once.
He said, "I know the way, -- come."
And I was overjoyed at this.
Together we hastened.
Soon, too soon, were we
Where my eyes were useless,
And I knew not the ways of my feet.
I clung to the hand of my friend;
But at last he cried, "I am lost."
Untitled poem (Bertolt Brecht)
General…
revere | November 11, 2006Today is called Veterans Day in the United States, but everywhere else it is Remembrance Day. When we were young it celebrated the end of shooting and was still Armistice Day. Now it celebrates the melancholy fact that young people have again picked up guns, not that they were at last able to put them down on the Eleventh Hour of the Eleventh Day of the Eleventh Month in 1918.
The change came during the Cold War. In 1954 we forgot Remembrance Day. Veterans Day does not honor fallen soldiers. That's Memorial Day. Veterans Day is about those who survive their service. Given how we treat them…
revere | November 10, 2006In an example of the adage, "Be careful what you wish for," China's choice for WHO Director General, Dr. Margaret Chan, is already finding her reputation will be held hostage to the behavior of China itself, not an enviable position.
The new chief of the World Health Organisation, Margaret Chan of China, pledged to put her nationality aside and to use her leverage on Beijing to combat major threats such as bird flu.
"Now I'm elected as the WHO's Director General I no longer carry my nationality on my sleeve. I leave it behind," she told reporters after her nomination was endorsed by more than…
revere | November 10, 2006Someone should tell the US government: "Big Blogger is Watching You." Both CIDRAP and crof's blog H5N1 picked up a story that the US State Department was advising its diplomatic and consular personnel in in Hong Kong and Macao to prepare for a possible "shelter-in-place" event by laying in a stockpile of food and water to last twelve weeks if there were a complete infrastructure breakdown in an influenza pandemic. CIDRAP noted this differs from advice on the US government pandemic flu site which suggests only a two week buffer.
You can read the original twelve week recommendation thanks to…
revere | November 9, 2006The US midterm election is over and the Democratic party will take control of the US House of Representatives. For the most part this is a good thing. A very good thing. For the most part. But there is a fly or two in the ointment. There always seems to be.
With the change of parties we will be getting new subcommittee chairpersons (the Chairs have great power over what laws get passed)and some are, shall we say, problematic. Like the "Honorable" Howard Berman who represents the district next to Holywood and is sometimes referred to as "the Representative from Disney" because he does the…
revere | November 9, 2006The Lancet has just published (NOvember 8, 2006, online publication) a major review of the scientific evidence suggesting developmental disorders in children traceable to chemicals in the environment is significant and largely overlooked. Authored by two internationally recognized scientists, Philippe Grandjean (Harvard School of Public Health and University of Southern Denmark) and Philip Landrigan (Mt. Sinai School of Medicine), the paper identifies 201 industrial chemicals with the capacity to cause a neurodevelopmental defect (NDD) such as autism, attention deficit disorder and mental…
revere | November 8, 2006The Tripoli 6 trial has ended without hearing the scientific evidence that could have exonerated the defendants, five Bulagarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor accused of intentionally infecting over 426 children with HIV in a hospital in Benghazi, Libya. The verdict on the case will be announced on December 19. These six unfortunate souls have now spent almost seven years in a Libyan prison, subjected to torture and now (again) an expected guilty verdict and sentence of death by firing squad. They are scapegoats for a failed Libyan health care system whose hygienic failings led to…
revere | November 8, 2006The headlines are exciting: Chinese scientists identify deadly gene in H5N1. The story is also upbeat:
Chinese scientists have identified a gene in the H5N1 bird flu virus which they say is responsible for its virulence in poultry, opening the way for new vaccines.
[snip]
"We can now understand how this virus becomes lethal and the molecular basis for its pathogenicity," Bu Zhigao at the Harbin Veterinary Research Institute told Reuters.
The science also turns out to be interesting, but on its face not the breakthrough the story implies. Maybe as we learn more we will find it is the key to…
revere | November 8, 2006The WHO Executive Board has selected Margaret Chan as the next Director General of the agency (via AP). Her name will go to the agency's governing body, the World Health Assembly, for approval tomorrow. Chan was strongly championed by China.
As we have made clear here, we didn't think Chan was the optimal choice at this point in WHO's history. We hope we were wrong and will look on with anxious interest to see how independent and visionary she will be in advancing WHO's mission.
We wish Dr. Chan -- and the rest -- of us, good luck.
revere | November 7, 2006The Lancet is my favorite medical journal. Maybe it's because I've had the privilege of publishing there on occasion, but mainly because they have consistently taken a public health perspective despite the fact they are a medical journal. Often that perspective has been controversial and just as often courageous. Like another of my favorite journals, Nature, The Lancet is published in the UK, which might explain its interest in global issues, compared to US medical publications like The New England Journal of Medicine or The Journal of the American Medical Association.
In any event, The…
revere | November 7, 2006Nothing says more about the routinely nasty depths American politics than this story.
In Houston, the city health department got money from the Robert Wood Johnson and Amerigroup Foundations, two charities much involved in health care, to provide free flu shots near polling places in medically underserved areas. This isn't uncommon. Some twenty other cities, in several states, are said to have similar "vote and vaccinate" programs (see for example, here). The idea is to go where the people who need the services are.
Nothing is simple anymore. Not even free flu shots for the poor. The right…
revere | November 6, 2006H5N1 bird flu is now in 55 countries, in each of which it has severe economic consequences on the poultry industry and carries with it an unknown but potentially catastrophic public health threat. Since it is s a disease of animals (primarily birds), much of the work has been done by veterinarians and ornithologists. One would expect us to have a great deal of information, given the attention this nasty virus has received, in the laboratory, the field and among the general public and press.
And we do. But a recent paper in the journal BioScience (published by the American Institute of…
revere | November 6, 2006Currently estimated bird flu case fatality ratio remains catastrophically high, somewhere around 60%. This may or may not be an accurate estimate. Case fatality is the ratio of cases that die to the number of people diagnosed with H5N1 infection. If we are missing many cases then our estimates of case fatality will be biased upwards. On the other hand, it is possible we are missing many deaths from H5N1 for the same reason: the case was not diagnosed. In Indonesia, for example, there are hundreds of thousands of deaths yearly from severe pneumonia. While the overwhelming majority are not bird…
revere | November 5, 2006Genes and bird flu are being talked about again. A WHO study is "stating" some kind of genetic factor may be at work, but it appears it is only an observation that in the notorious Indonesian Karo cluster of eight family members, only those "related by blood" were affected by the human-to-human spread:
Only blood relatives were infected in the Karo district of North Sumatra, the largest cluster known to date worldwide, "despite multiple opportunities for the virus to spread to spouses or into the general community," it added.
The theory - which it said merited further study - was contained in…
revere | November 5, 2006Sunday and the day before the US midterm elections. Pundits are speculating on the role religious conservatives will play. We are now so inured to politicians invoking their faith it sounds strange to think it has been any other way. But it has been, and within my voting lifetime. Over a year ago in one of my first Sermonettes in this space I recalled those days. It seems appropriate to do it again.
On Monday, September 12, 1960, Democratic Presidential candidate John F. Kennedy faced the Southern Baptists at the Greater Houston Ministerial Association on the subject of religion in American…
revere | November 4, 2006The US midterm election will be held on November 7 and American politicians are busy doing what they do best: pointing fingers at each other and avoiding the issues. They are not the only ones campaigning for office next, week. The two days after the US elections the World Health Organization executive committee will also elect a new Director General. The choice may or may not turn out to be of equal importance to the US election. It will depend on who is elected.
Why might it matter? WHO is reaching a critical point in its history. Founded in 1948 in the wake of the Second World War, WHO was…
revere | November 3, 2006Well, not exactly. She's already been to college and is now a PhD candidate in neurosciences at the University of Michigan. More to the point, ScienceBlogs own Shelley Batts (maitresse of Retrospectacle) is one of the finalists for a $5000 Blogger scholarship and all she needs to win is for you all to vote for her.
Check out her blog Retrospectacle (if you don't already know it) to see some of the many reasons you should vote for her. And then go here [Update, 9/5/07: this site has moved to here] to vote for the most deserving (aka, Shelley Batts).
Do it now. It will get you in practice for…
revere | November 3, 2006It is tiresome to report the same story over and over again (for a few previous posts see here, here, here, here and here), but sometimes necessary. It has been widely reported -- again -- that the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture is withholding isolates of H5N1 it promised to provide. Indeed, WHO's Beijing office reports it has received no isolates since 2004.
The issue came to the scientific world's attention again last week when a team of Hong Kong and American researchers reported a new sublineage of H5N1 has become dominant in southern China and southeast asia in the last year, the first…
revere | November 3, 2006I'm currently at a meeting in Europe and listening to -- really looking at -- scientific papers. I say "looking at" because they all are using PowerPoint, the scourge of modern day lecturing.
Don't get me wrong. I use PowerPoint, too. Everyone uses PowerPoint. It is so easy to make nice looking slides and modifying them at the last minute is also easy-- I have been known to do it on the fly while sitting on a panel waiting to give my own paper, we are almost forced to use them. In fact if you have 35 mm slides these days you are likely out of luck as the meetings no longer provide 35 mm…