revere | November 29, 2009We talk so much about the flu virus we thought we'd show you some nice pics that CDC has just put up. This is a review for many of you put reviews are always helpful. In these three pics, only one is the actual swine flu virus, the other two being "cartoon" depictions of a generic influenza virus. The cartoons are quite nice and helpful to see what you are looking at in the electron micrograph of influenza virions (virus particles), probably grown in tissue culture. I say "probably" because there is no other information on the site other than the micrograph was taken in the CDC Influenza…
revere | November 29, 2009When the singer-songwriter Phil Ochs took his own life in 1976 he was a year and a half older than me. It's hard for some of us to believe he's been gone 33 years. His music and the ideals he fought for are still so strong. Phil was best known for his anti-war songs. Yet he wrote a different kind of song that continues to grow in importance to me as I near the end of my own life. Like many people my age I'm losing a lot of friends, colleagues and family of late -- two in the last month and word that yet another is near the end of her life and entering hospice care. While I remain relatively…
revere | November 28, 2009I sometimes wake up in the middle of the night and think about things. In fact I frequently have a problem with early waking. I think it's age related. In any event, one of the things I sometimes think about (mainly I think about my research or something connected with it, which is one reason why I have trouble going back to sleep) is what side of the great scientific controversies I'd be on. Like Galileo. Everyone thinks of his problem with the Church (allegedly) because he championed heliocentrism (the true story seems to be more political, complicated and nuanced, but I'll leave that for…
revere | November 27, 2009It seems swine flu is full of surprises that turn out not to be surprises. Or so it's claimed. Or not. Here is CDC's Dr. Anne Schuchat, the agency's chief health officer and spokesperson on swine flu, responding to NPR's Melissa Block's question about what has been her biggest surprise:
Dr. SCHUCHAT: I shouldn't have been surprised, but I have been surprised about this disproportionate toll that it's taking in pregnant women. I think I'd never lived before a pandemic before, and I actually hadn't seen the really sorry and just the tragic stories of healthy pregnant women coming down with such…
revere | November 26, 2009Today is Thanksgiving in the United States, and the inevitable political innuendoes aside, it's usually a holiday I like. I'm fond of my family -- both my own and my wife's -- and glad to see them, although in recent years we have dwindled down to a few. Still, I basically have good memories of these meals. Having said that, it's also a time when Americans eat too much, and although I'm not a big eater (and even less so as I age), any big holiday meal always makes me think of the first visit to my wife's extended family. I come from a laid back Jewish upbringing (I dumped any religious…
revere | November 25, 2009We just realized that today is our fifth blogiversary. Young if you are a human, prime of life if you are a dog, but Methuselah if you are a blog. We've not gone dark for a single day in those five years, although on many we've thought about turning off the lights permanently. But we're still here, the day before Thanksgiving. That's not a coincidence.
In 2004 Thanksgiving fell on November 25. One of the original reveres (the one tapping these keys, in fact) was making a nuisance of himself in the kitchen as Mrs. R. was trying to prepare one of her virtuouso Thanksgiving dinners. She shooed…
revere | November 25, 2009In the US we are about to embark on the Thanksgiving holiday, a 4 day period where families get together for a celebratory meal (at least celebratory unless you are one of the original inhabitants of the continent). There is lots of intergenerational visiting (grandparents to great grandchildren and lots of mingling of people from disparate geographic areas). In the midst of a swine flu pandemic, the obvious question is the epidemiologic implications. Ordinarily there is some effect. Ordinarily.
Thanksgiving is typically followed by at least a modest bump in early seasonal flu cases,…
revere | November 24, 2009All geeks love science jokes (one of my favorites: what's purple and drives to work? Answer: an Abelian grape [explanation, the elements of an Abelian group commute, i.e., a + b = b + a]).
Science jokes are good. You can learn some science from them. In particular, the first three or four of this set of groaners involve viruses and infectious diseases and each tell you -- vividly -- an important truth. The rest are pretty good, too.
Enjoy (hat tip Boingboing):
revere | November 23, 2009The US has ordered 250 million doses of swine flu vaccine, mainly from foreign manufacturers. That's a large proportion of the world's productive capacity. A couple of the biggest vaccine makers, Glaxo-SmithKline (GSK) and Sanofi Pasteur, have promised to make donations to WHO for use in the poorer countries and with some smaller donations that's maybe 160 million doses. Countries like the US that earlier had pledged 10% of their supply have yet to do so, and given the political problems of sending overseas vaccine when there's not enough for US citizens, well, good luck with that. So at best…
revere | November 22, 2009Since the way Chinese public health officials traditionally save face is by covering their ass, when I hear things like this I don't automatically believe it:
"With initial efforts of containment, actually we not only reduced the impact of the first wave to China, but we also won time for us to prepare the vaccine" now being given to China's people, [Chen Zhu, China's health minister] said in an interview during the Havana meeting of the Global Forum for Health Research.
After the swine flu first appeared in Mexico last spring, China put Mexican visitors — and people from other countries who…
revere | November 21, 2009The Norwegian Institute of Public Health is reporting sporadic occurrences of a mutation in a portion of the flu virus that is involved with the process by which it attaches to cells. I use the word "sporadic" because at this point there is no evidence that the cases where the genetic change has been found are epidemiologically linked. Therefore we don't see it spreading from person to person but rather arising in people after they have been infected. At least that's how it appears from reports, but we have only preliminary information at this point. According to WHO, the mutation has been…
revere | November 20, 2009Swine flu is a special danger to the young, but the biggest danger to the young is not an infectious disease but unintentional accidents. No matter what your age accident is among the top ten causes of death, but for those between the ages of 1 and 44 it is number one. Prevention oriented accident specialists are fond of saying that "accidents are no accidents," by which they mean that many accidental deaths are in some sense avoidable, not freakish twists of fortune. So wear your seat belts and don't go golfing in lightning storms. And while you're at it, have health insurance, since there…
revere | November 19, 2009The Director of Loyola University Medical Center's clinical microbiology laboratory is reported as saying that rapid flu tests are a public health risk. Here's some of what he said and then my explanation as to why it is misleading or just plain wrong:
Rapid influenza diagnostic tests used in doctors' offices, hospitals and medical laboratories to detect H1N1 are virtually useless and could pose a significant danger to public health, according to a Loyola University Medical Center researcher.
"At Loyola, we determined four years ago that the rapid tests for influenza detected only 50 percent…
revere | November 18, 2009I have been away (again) and out of internet contact most of the day, dealing with an unhappy family event. So this post is short but illustrates an important point that comes up frequently in epidemiology: the difference between risks and absolute numbers. The illustration is not medical, but I think sharper because of it:
The right-wing blog Gateway Pundit says Christians are the target of more hate crimes in the U.S. than Muslims:
In the real world... Hate crimes against Muslims have steadily declined since 2001. Today there are more reported hate crimes against Christians in the United…
revere | November 17, 2009The blogosphere (DemFromCT at DailyKos) and the main stream media (Alan Sipress at the Washington Post) brought us the two faces of the current flu pandemic. Like Janus, one took lessons from the present and past, the other looked worriedly to the future.
Dem's piece on flu at DailyKos (a regular feature of the world's biggest political blog) is superb. Most everyone who regularly reads about flu in the blogosphere (and it is a huge readership) knows that DemFromCT is the blog handle of an expert who has been writing about pandemic flu for years (as long or longer than we have and we are…
revere | November 16, 2009We were asked repeatedly offline and in the comments for our views on what was or was not going on in the Ukraine, but we steadfastly declined to post on it. We didn't know any more than you can find out from news sources, so we had nothing to add in the way of hard information, We did know there was a WHO team on the ground and we thought it best to wait to find out more. We still don't know much, except that news reports are suggesting that the health care system in the Ukraine is a shambles and its likely the chaos and panic were self-inflicted more than virally inflicted. Mike Coston over…
revere | November 15, 2009Any article entitled "On swine-flu conspiracy theories" should have an automatic warning label, but the one noted below, in the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail is really terrific (h/t ML). Conspiracy theories are all over the internet and they even show up here in the comments from time to time, but I'm glad to say our readership is saner than some. Like scientific theories, conspiracy theories aren't hard to formulate (humans being an inventive and imaginative species), but like good science, conspiracies aren't so easy to implement. It's not that conspiracies don't exist, the…
revere | November 15, 2009You all know this song, but it is unusually affecting when sung by a child:
revere | November 14, 2009We've talked aplenty about how much we still need to understand about influenza. Not just its basic biology but its dynamics. How does it spread over space and time and how existing infection rates affect future infection rates and how each are related to the number of susceptibles in the population. It's even more than that. There are other viruses perhaps competing for or perhaps cooperating with the flu virus in its sole job, to make copies of itself, using the host's (i.e., our own) biological machinery. You can imagine a scenario whereby once a lot of cells are infected by one virus,…