revere | April 14, 2010I am pro-abortion. Not in the sense that I think abortions are good. I don't. In the sense that I am pro-surgery for medical conditions that can be surgically treated, or pro-pharmaceuticals for medical conditions that can be treated with drugs. I consider an unwanted fertilization to be a medical condition with significant consequences that can be treated. Now that I have gotten that out of the way I hope I can be free to state some ambivalence later about some other matters related to the anti-abortion movement.
But no ambivalence about a woman's ability to get an abortion. Roe v. Wade was…
revere | April 13, 2010The Grant (here, here, here) is finally done and going in Fed Ex tomorrow morning. It's been a long haul and we will undoubtedly be sending in preliminary results or new publications between now and the end of September, since the review isn't until November. That's right. I've been working on it for a year and now we won't find out anything until next December. The current funding period goes until a year from now. We've proposed to do a lot of complicated science over 5 years, which always makes me think of the saying that there is only 2 things that can go wrong when you submit a grant.…
revere | April 12, 2010Markos Moulitsas is the founder and publisher of DailyKos, the world's largest political blog. He travels quite a bit and is dependent on his laptop and the internet. So I read his first experience with the iPad with a great deal of interest. Go read it (like they need the traffic; on a quiet Sunday night they are running 35,000 visits an hour!). Bottom line: overwhelmingly positive for someone who has a few, routine but critical functions handled by email and Microsoft Office level programs. I've already written about my own plans to get one later in the year, after the kinks are worked out…
revere | April 11, 2010To mark the end of grant writing, a bit of a departure: Music that isn't political. A French band called Okou (words are in English). Tatiana Heintz (vocals) is a French woman whose mother is from the Ivory Coast and Gilbert Trefzger (steel guitar) is Swiss. His father is from Egypt. They are now based in the UK. I'm not sure how to describe their music, but I learned of it from one of my favorite blogs (and a daily read), The Brain Police. The blogger Microdot lives in rural France, hails from Detroit and was a professional musician. He and his wife are old friends. Enjoy:
revere | April 10, 2010This song was written by Florence Reece in 1930 - 1931 during the bloody campaign to organize workers in Harlan County, KY. They were fighting for safer working conditions. Mine safety has improved since then, mainly because of the mine workers union, but workers in many mines, like the Upper Big Branch in Montcoal, WV have no union. If they complain about safety, they are out of a job. In this area and in the West Virginia legislature, Big Coal is still king.
Natalie Merchant:
revere | April 9, 2010This week Canadian public health researchers published the long awaited paper on possible association between vaccination for seasonal influenza the previous flu season and risk of having a medically diagnosed infection with pandemic influenza during the first wave of infections (April to July) just as that season was ending. When preliminary results were first announced there was only vaccine against seasonal flu, which was still being given, and the results were contrary to what we thought we knew about flu biology and the immune system. Inevitably it became caught up in the wider anti-…
revere | April 8, 2010Yesterday I gave a nod to an important epidemiologist, the late Alice Stewart. I'm old enough to have known her, but not old enough to know the most famous epidemiologist of all -- indeed sometimes called the "Father of Epidemiology" -- Dr. John Snow. Snow is also claimed as the "Father of Anesthesiology" because he administered chloroform to Queen Victoria during the births of her second and third children, thus popularizing the practice in the mid 19th century. Neither epidemiologists nor anesthesiologists seem to be aware that their dad had two families, but that's another issue. The…
revere | April 7, 2010If you aren't an epidemiologist of a certain age -- or even if you are -- you've probably not heard of Alice Stewart. Alice was one of England's premier epidemiologists in the mid to late 20th century, but I didn't meet her until she was in her 80s. At the time she could still bound up the two flights of stairs to my office like a teen in good shape. I'm not exaggerating. She literally took it at top speed and without becoming breathless. When she died at age 95 in 2002, obituaries frequently described her as "indefatigable," and she was certainly that. "Boundless energy" might be another…
revere | April 7, 2010Dear influenza virus:
You owe the Council of Europe and a number of others an apology. They are angry -- and rightly so -- that you didn't kill many more people and wreak havoc in every country on the globe. You could have. Other influenza viruses killed a lot of people, especially when there was no natural immunity in the population. As far as anyone can tell you aren't any different. When you surprised us there was no effective vaccine. You had the perfect opportunity and you blew it. As for the vaccine we got later, it's no excuse. I read in the British Medical Journal the vaccine might…
revere | April 5, 2010We are now through with two major religious holidays, Easter and Passover. I dislike both holidays, Easter because it is soaked in images of cruelty and mythology, Passover because it is a nationalistic orgy. Now that I've offended half my readership, let me say something positive about something I once thought pretty silly: a version of Coca Cola branded as "Kosher for Passover." It's a small thing, to be sure, but an interesting one, at least to me. This post started with a research highlight I read over the weekend in the journal Nature, summarizing work published in Pharmacology,…
revere | April 4, 2010I haven't bought myself an iPad yet, but I'll probably do it before heading off on vacation in August. By that time it will have passed its shakedown phase and we'll know the best and worst. But from what I see and hear it looks pretty good, especially if you travel a lot. My trusty MacBook Pro weighs about 6 lbs with everything and this is less than 2 lbs (if I spring for the docking keyboard). One knock on it is price: $499 (and more if I go for the 3G version at $630. But it's all relative. Relative to what?
In 1981 I bought my first computer, an Apple II+. It had no monitor, 48K of RAM (…
revere | April 3, 2010Better late than never. When the Bush administration proposed sweeping airport quarantine rules in 2005, even those of us most concerned about avian influenza thought it was a fruitless policy on scientific grounds, not to mention issues of civili liberties and economics. The airlines hated it, too:
The regulations, proposed in 2005 during the Bush administration amid fears of avian flu, would have given the federal government additional powers to detain sick airline passengers and those exposed to certain diseases. They also would have expanded requirements for airlines to report ill…
revere | April 2, 2010There's a lot of fascinating robotics work being done these days, although it is disheartening to see how much of it is designed to help kill people or just kill them outright. But not all of it and over at Boingboing there was an example of a project designed to do household chores. We already have Roombas to clean the floor and a lot of laundry is sort of automated (at least the wash, scrub, rinse, dry cycles are). But then there's the unpleasant task of taking them out of the washing machine, dumping them into the drier, taking them out of the drier and folding them. The firs three of…
revere | April 1, 2010The AMA just took over a journal called Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness. In fact they proudly announced they were the exclusive publisher and distributor of the journal, formerly published by Lippincott, Williams and Wilkins. I wouldn't even know about it except it was in connection with a press release of an article likely to be of interest any health care worker: ":Which Health Care Workers Were Most Affected During the Spring 2009 H1N1 Pandemic?" by Santos, Bristow and Vorenkamp of Weill-Cornell Medical School in New York. And the AMA even said it was redesigning the…
revere | March 31, 2010The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Janet Napolitano is asking academics to work with her agency to develop "innovative initiatives" to protect the nation from terrorist threats. This is what I would call a faith-based initiative, in this case, faith in the technological fix. DHS could certainly use some help. It's one of the most clueless and incompetent agency in the federal government. But I don't think the answer to the problem is going to be found in nanotechnology, computer science or micrcomputer circuitry:
The DHS noted that the cooperation between its departments and…
revere | March 30, 2010There is a good Canadian Press by Michael Macdonald about the often long time it takes to make a full recovery from flu. A full blown case of classical influenza can really lay you low for days or weeks. People often report never having felt so sick. But once you are "recovered" and back to work or your daily activities you aren't necessarily fully recovered:
Marga Cugnet thought she knew what she was in for when she came down with swine flu last October.
But the health administrator from Weyburn, Sask., said she was annoyed and somewhat dejected when the potent H1N1 virus left her with…
revere | March 29, 2010A day or two after CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports (MMWR) released a report about risks to pregnant women from pandemic 2009 flu, CDC held a suddenly announced press briefing about the current H1N1 situation (I listened in but a transcript should be up on the site by the time you read this; check this page). The occasion for the briefing was a worrisome increase in hospitalizations and deaths in CDC's Georgia backyard. Despite housing CDC, Georgia has one of the lower flu vaccination rates in the country and now is experiencing an unexpected recrudescence of H1N1 flu, with…