revere | December 21, 2008Forty Fifty years ago this week, in a world even more strife torn than today's, the Apollo 8 spacecraft was approaching the moon, not to land there, but to orbit it:
Apollo 8 had set off a few days before Christmas. It was the most daring space mission ever, taking astronauts William Anders, Jim Lovell and Frank Borman further from Earth than humans had ever been.
Early on Christmas Eve, the craft reached Lunar orbit. The first Moon landing, by Apollo 11, would not take place for another seven months, but Apollo 8 was a test of whether the spacecraft worked. It did, and at 3am London time on…
revere | December 20, 2008I spent about a decade as a researcher at a highly regarded technical university in the northeast, known by its three initials. This was in the sixties and seventies. I loved working there because there were probably more interesting people per square meter than any other place I ever worked. Interesting and eccentric. The place had a high tolerance for eccentricity, at least of a certain kind. I mention the time period because the tech nerds of the day had to make do with more primitive technologies than now. They loved to screw with the phone system and I remember watching some kid call a…
revere | December 19, 2008It should surprise no one that bird flu is back in Asia, not just in poultry but in people. That's because it's flu season and the bird flu virus, has been "out there" all along, simmering in the rich broth of aquatic and landbased birds. There are new outbreaks in India, China, Cambodia, and Hong Kong and deaths in humans in Cambodia, Indonesia and Egypt.
India:
Outbreaks have been confirmed in at least three states. In the last three days health authorities have ordered the culling of 9,373 birds in Malda (West Bengal) despite opposition by local residents, who have reacted to the measure…
revere | December 18, 2008The Holiday Season is upon us so we won't post daily on the Public Health Conversation series. But you can join in at any time, in two ways. Effect Measure and The Pump Handle, the two blog sites hosting the discussion, have comment threads for each post. You can make a comment at any time on any post. If you want to see all the posts on this topic, just click the Progressive public health category on the left sidebar on Effect Measure. We will put an appropriate tag on The Pump Handle posts as well. If you have produced a more polished piece, send it by email to The Pump Handle. We will be…
revere | December 17, 2008A couple of ideas are floating around in the comment threads as part of an initial conversation about public health. I'm not surprised they seem to be on different topics and have the feel of talking past each other. We are not used to discussing basic assumptions and have an immediate tendency to talk about what we know, what interests us particularly, what bothers us most or what is our particular preoccupation. Many of those things turn out to be really important for public health and there are plenty of reasons for talking about them.
Annie, for example, is frustrated with other medical…
revere | December 16, 2008I'm (more than) pleased to say the public health conversation is starting. I assume it was already going on but not where we could all hear what others were saying. So let me continue by responding to a point raised at The Pump Handle (TPH) that was also the subject of offline discussion from someone who read the post. Liz and Catherine (at TPH) made special reference to this comment from me:
"If I am an ordinary person, I don't want to have to think about public health. I want it to work well but in the background, like the water system."
Each had a slightly different take on it, as did my…
revere | December 15, 2008Yesterday Flu Wiki founding editor and DailyKos frontpager DemFromCT reviewed three recent report cards on public health, one each by the American Public Health Association (APHA), The Trust for America's Health (TFAH) and the American College Of Emergency Physicians (ACEP). It was a great a service in two ways. The first is to remind us that "health reform" is hollow without making sure the public health infrastructure is sound. And second, he reviewed these reports so the rest of us don't have to. Believe me, that's a service in my eyes. My patience gets pretty short when I see these tomes…
revere | December 14, 2008I have three grandchildren (all wonderful, naturally) and the oldest is five years old today. I put wonderful in parentheses because most grandparents think their grandchildren are wonderful while the rest of the world just thinks they are a few more of the world's billions of children. Mine are luckier than most of them, having survived their first few months and more. But I got to thinking about what the world will be like when today's Birthday Boy is my age. Obviously I have no idea (nor do you), but I can at least look back on what the world was like when I was his age. That would be…
revere | December 14, 2008The French philosophe, Denis Diderot (1713-1784), was a guiding intellect of The Enlightenment and a principal author of its central document, L'Encyclopédie, which set the tone for the modern view where religion is just another superstition.
Classic Diderot is always bracing. Here is some:
Wandering in a vast forest at night, I have only a faint light to guide me. A stranger appears and says to me: "My friend, you should blow out your candle in order to find your way more clearly." This stranger is a theologian.
Denis Diderot, Addition aux Pensees philosophiques, from John Daintith, et al,…
revere | December 13, 2008Whether they are called the White House Press Secretary or the regime's Information Minister, they seem to have in common one characteristic: they are professional liars. It goes without saying that all of Bush's press secretaries have been blatant liars, but it's also true of Clinton's and virtually very one of their predecessors. Some of them have been much more likable than others and when they lied made my hackles rise less, but they were still professional liars and why anyone believes what they say is one of the big mysteries. I have to keep reminding myself that our "Information…
revere | December 12, 2008Energy may be the topic du jour but it's been the 800 lb. gorilla in the room for, oh, a couple of centuries. In a sense it's responsible for one of the greatest occupational health catastrophes of the 20th century, and a new report from CDC demonstrates once again it's still with us and killing working people. I'm talking about asbestos-related disease. Asbestos and the asbestos industry is a creature par excellance of the age of energy in the 19th century. Its primary uses were for insulating steam pipes and boilers, where heat loss was measured in dollars of coal energy down the drain. I'…
revere | December 11, 2008In my younger days I was quite enamored of radiology as a specialty. I published some papers in that area and enjoyed reading x-rays, quite a complex task, requiring the reader to integrate three dimensional anatomy with two dimensional shadows and relate that to physiology, pathology, surgery, medicine and who knows what else. It was interesting and it was fun. The field has changed a lot since those days. For one thing, the pictures are not all two dimensional any more. First CAT scans and the MRIs have made it possible to reconstruct the two dimensional shadows, taken at a bunch of angles…
revere | December 10, 2008I'm sitting here reading Tuesday's Wall Street Journal -- what? Revere subscribes to the WSJ? No, but for reasons known only to Darwin, every couple of days a copy is delivered to my door, each with someone else's address on it, and never the same someone else two times in a row -- so, anyway, I'm reading the WSJ about the auto industry bailout goings on, and there's an article about how auto parts suppliers are going under, many whether there's a bailout or not, apparently because demand is so soft and credit so tight and margins so small that they can't make it (I'm reading in dead tree…
revere | December 9, 2008Old folks are dangerous enough. I should know. I am one. Bad enough you allow me to hurtle down the highway in semi-control of a couple of tons of steel while thinking about science (at least I'm not thinking about decking some young thing or even decking some young thing while hurtling down the highway in semi-control of a couple tons of steel). But put a weapon specially designed for my cold, arthritic hands? (OK, they're not arthritic, but they probably will be soon). This story (hat tip reader emc) is almost too bizarre:
A US company claims to have received federal approval to market a 9…
revere | December 8, 2008Blogging will be light for the next day or so because the eventuality I feared most, that I would get the day care incubated norovirus-like illness that grandson #2 incubated, has come to pass. I had to cancel an extremely important trip to a scientific meeting in California. There is no hope I'd make it and I'd probably infect everyone on the plane t rows up and 5 rows back, not to mention my colleague I was going to share a room with. So I am super miserable and now my son-in-law is down with it and my daughter is feeling "seriously queasy." Mrs. R. is morosely waiting for the other shoe to…
revere | December 7, 2008I vaguely remember a medical school lecture about dracunculiasis, also known as Guinea Worm Disease. Also called the "fiery serpent" these are very long worms that grow in people and then the females get hungry and start to burrow out of them, sort of like Alien but not quite as quickly or as dramatically nor out of their chest. Usually out of the tops of their feet. Here are the basics of the life cycle:
When I first heard about dracunculiasis the world had many millions of people suffering this debilitating horror. In 1986 the Carter Center, the creation of former President Jimmy Carter,…
revere | December 7, 2008It seems Republicans have been inaccurately crediting George Bush with keeping us safe from terrorists since 9/11 (conveniently omitting the anthrax attacks which came from within the US weapons establishment; I guess that means whoever did it wasn't a terrorist). It took a Democrat in the Kentucky legislature to identify the real Protector -- God. And not saying Loud and Proud is against the law. At least in Kentucky:
A lawmaker says the state's Homeland Security office should be crediting God with keeping the state safe.
State Rep. Tom Riner, a Southern Baptist minister who was instrumental…
revere | December 6, 2008So here's the deal. Grandson #2 picked up some kind of norovirus-like thing at daycare and by late afternoon was seriously engaged in projectile vomiting. My daughter and I picked him and his little 'bro up (his dad was in class) and brought them to her house. Since I am getting ready for a scientific meeting across the country I didn't feature doing my own projectile vomiting high above Iowa. Yes, I know they have these airsickness bags, so it would be a convenient place. But these days they probably charge you $5 per bag. So I took care of Mr. Four Months Old and stayed away from Mr. Virus…
revere | December 6, 200844 more days until these murdering bastards are out of OUR government. Meanwhile how much damage will they do? Damage, as in broken bodies, maimed children, dead people:
An Afghan teenager who lost both legs in a cluster bomb explosion helped persuade his country to change its stance and join nearly 100 nations in signing a treaty Wednesday banning the disputed weapons.
Afghanistan was initially reluctant to join the pact - which the United States and Russia have refused to support - but agreed to after lobbying by victims maimed by cluster munitions, including 17-year-old Soraj Ghulan Habib…
revere | December 5, 2008So what does heartburn have to do with diabetes? Funny you should ask. Big Pharma giant AstraZeneca is being sued by 15,000 people who claim that their atypical antipsychotic, Seroquel, causes diabetes. Seroquel is approved for bipolar disorder, but unless there are a lot more people with bipolar disorder than we know, it is clearly being use off label because it is AstraZeneca's second best selling drug. What's the best seller, at least for now? The heartburn/ulcer drug, Nexium:
Seroquel, used to treat bipolar disorder, brought in $4.03 billion last year, making it AstraZeneca's second-…