revere | November 15, 2008You probably never heard of the EPA Appeals Board, but they have just handed down a ruling that will affect scores of power plants using coal. Affect them how? Not clear at the moment:
The uncertainty resulted when an Environmental Protection Agency appeals panel on Thursday rejected a federal permit for a Utah plant, leaving the issue for the Obama administration to resolve.
The panel said the EPA's Denver office failed to adequately support its decision to issue a permit for the Bonanza plant without requiring controls on carbon dioxide, the leading pollutant linked to global warming.
The…
revere | November 15, 2008One of the good things about the pandemic flu threat (if you'll let me put it that way) is the stimulus it has provided for vaccine technology. While current flu vaccines are still mired in horse and buggy technology of egg-based production, all sorts of alternative ways of making antigen or stimulating an immune response are being worked on. Most of them involve the major antigens of the flu virus, hemagglutinin (the H part of subtype designation) and neuriminidase (the N part). They are on the viral surface and easily "seen" by the immune system. There is also a little bit of another…
revere | November 14, 2008Reader JJ reminds me that while we celebrate Obama's victory and a new mood of hope and optimism in the US, the people of the Gaza strip have little to celebrate and even less reason for hope and optimism:
The UN has no more food to distribute in the Gaza Strip, the head of relief efforts in the area has warned.
John Ging said handouts for 750,000 Gazans would have to be suspended until Saturday at the earliest, and called Gaza's economic situation "a disaster".
Israel earlier denied entry to a convoy carrying humanitarian supplies.
It has prevented the transfer of all goods into Gaza for…
revere | November 14, 2008The idea of stopping flu "at the border" has received almost uniformly bad reviews from public health experts. Once human to human transmission starts we won't be able to stop it by closing our borders, although we likely will cause the usual unintended consequences, like preventing vital personnel and supplies from getting to where we need them. At least if we do it in the usual ham handed way this administration is famous for. We learn via CIDRAP News that federal officials are still willing to give a "risk-based border strategy" (RBBS) a go, at least in the form of an exercise. Now, at…
revere | November 13, 2008If there's an influenza pandemic in the near future all bets are off when it comes to unplanned for consequences. Well, maybe not all bets. Right now the only oral antiviral likely to have any effectiveness in a pandemic is oseltamivir (Tamiflu), although how effective and how long it would retain any effectiveness is in question. But there's a lot of it out there and it will be taken in high volume and, either in its capsule form [oseltamivir ethylester-phosphate (OE-P)] or its active form [oseltamivir carboxylate (OC)], excreted into the sewer system in massive quantities (discussed here…
revere | November 13, 2008Last spring NIH scientist Charles Natanson published a meta-analysis of studies on hemoglobin-based blood substitutes in the Journal of the American Medical Association (Natanson, C., Kern, S. J., Lurie, P., Banks, S. M. & Wolfe, S. M. J. Am. Med. Assoc. 299, 2304-2312 (2008)). Blood substitutes are . . . well . . . blood substitutes. Like blood, they carry oxygen, but have long shelf lives, don't need refrigeration, don't require cross-matching and meet the need for situations where there is a shortage of fresh whole blood. A meta-analysis is a systematic summary, often expressed…
revere | November 12, 2008In the 1960s, long before anyone ever heard of "World Music," a young South African artist by the name of Miriam Makeba made us fall in love with the music of her continent. Known throughout the world as Mama Africa, Miriam Makeba collapsed and died on Monday just after leaving a concert stage in Italy. I am glad she lived to see the United States, a country where she lived and performed for many years, just days before turn a corner on race.
Miriam Makeba has a special place in the hearts and lives of so many of us she inspired then and continued to inspire through the many dark decades she…
revere | November 12, 2008Half of all restaurants in the United States are fast food restaurants. They do $100 billion worth of business a year (that's one seventh of a Bailout, a new unit of expenditure). A lot of the fast food is in the form of beef (hamburgers), chicken (sandwiches, tenders or nuggets) and french fries. A new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS, familiarly known in the trade as "penis") uses stable isotope analysis to trace the input materials in three large fast food chains. The results can be summed up in one word -- corn:
We used carbon and nitrogen stable isotopes…
revere | November 11, 2008
The Reveres, November 11, 2008, year five of the War in Iraq and year seven of the War in Afghanistan
revere | November 11, 2008Dr. Susan Wood blogs on occasion over at The Pump Handle (where we cross post quite often). She is pretty busy these day on another assignment: co-chairman of Obama's advisory committee for women's health. And it's reported one of the first things the Obama administration will do is undo the blue-nosed Bush policy that links funding for public health programs to anti-abortion and anti-birth control policies:
Public-health policies of President George W. Bush's $45- billion PEPFAR program have brought AIDS drugs to almost 3 million people in poor countries such as Rwanda and Uganda, more than…
revere | November 10, 2008The common simile of someone being shunned like a leper is an irony considering we still don't know how leprosy is transmitted. Leprosy (now usually referred to as Hansen's Disease) is still being diagnosed in the US, with an annual incidence of about 150 cases a year and a prevalence of about 3000 cases. Those 3000 cases under treatment are probably an underestimate, since the disease is difficult to diagnose and there is little knowledge or experience with it among health care providers.
EurekAlert notes a report to be presented at the upcoming meeting of the American Society of Tropical…
revere | November 10, 2008One resource the incoming Obama administration is certainly to find no shortage of is advice. We don't know whom they will listen to, although we know much of it -- maybe most of it -- is likely to be of the self-serving variety. How to separate the wheat from the chaff will be a delicate task. Powerful people who give lousy advice still get bent out of shape when it isn't followed. So we'll have to see. Meanwhile we will be scanning whatever advice is made public. An example is a report from the Defense Science Board, issued on Election Day, no less. It purports to give the next…
revere | November 9, 2008Unemployment is up, state and local tax revenues are down. Along with their jobs people are losing their health insurance. Their sole remedy will be Medicaid, jointly financed by the states and the federal government. What a great time to cut the federal share of support:
In the first of an expected avalanche of post-election regulations, the Bush administration on Friday narrowed the scope of services that can be provided to poor people under Medicaid's outpatient hospital benefit.
Public hospitals and state officials immediately protested the action, saying it would reduce Medicaid payments…
revere | November 9, 2008Breaking up is hard to do. We all know that. Once science and religion got along. They even thought they could make a go of it. But let's face it, they lived in different worlds. It just wasn't to be. It's probably better for the children:
revere | November 8, 2008When I think of what happens in November I think of elections, Thanksgiving, the first snowfall, the advent of winter. I don't think about being killed by running into a deer. But November is apparently the most likely time for that to happen. And it happens to a couple of hundred people a year in the US:
In November, when it comes to avoiding deer collisions, it's not the one you see crossing the road that's likely to get you, according to a wildlife expert.
"It's the one that's chasing her," said Dr. Billy Higginbotham, Texas AgriLife Extension Service fisheries and wildlife specialist.…
revere | November 8, 2008One nasty (and usually fatal) consequence of infection with bird flu (influenza A/H5N1) in humans is that the virus doesn't just infect the lungs but becomes disseminated to many different organs. We know that a bird-like receptor that the virus can use to get into cells is found in several other organs, including the lining of blood vessels and neural tissues. Central nervous system involvement is frequently a hallmark of fatal bird flu cases. The virus probably gets to a lot of other organs, as well. But how? An examination of the blood of a fatal case in a pregnant woman suggests answer…
revere | November 7, 2008So we have more Salmonella contamination out and about. This one is in dry pet food. But it wasn't the pets that were getting the Salmonella:
Salmonella-contaminated dry pet food sickened at least 79 people, including many young children, and could still be dangerous, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported on Thursday.
Even though the affected brands have been recalled and the factory in Pennsylvania closed, pet owners could still have the cat and dog kibble in their homes, the CDC said.
[snip]
"Dry pet food has a 1-year shelf life. Contaminated products identified in…
revere | November 7, 2008The virulent influenza A subtype H5N1, known colloquially as bird flu, has caused sporadic cases of human disease but has not yet become a pandemic strain. There are several things which still separate H5N1 from the kind of seasonal influenza infections that are a serious periodic public health threat to humans. A significant population immunity to the seasonal virus subtypes is probably a major factor preventing seasonal flu from being the pandemic monster that the 1918 flu became. But there are other differences, too.
H5N1 currently seems to prefer birds to humans, a second difference. We…
revere | November 6, 2008Lots of speculation about Obama's appointments and perhaps the most science oriented one is Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. Wired has a list of the rumored possibles, via Bloomberg:
Leading candidates for the position, reports Bloomberg News, include former Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection head Kathleen McGinty; California Air Resources Board leader Mary Nichols; Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection leader Ian Bowles; Kansas governor Kathleen Sibelius; New Jersey environmental commissioner Lisa Jackson; and environmental lawyer Robert F…
revere | November 6, 2008I wasn't in Grant Park the night Barack Obama won the election, which is a pity as it seemed like a joyous and life affirming event. But I've been in Grant Park with tens of thousands of others, the last time 40 years ago. There was tear gas everywhere, students and others being clubbed to the ground by berserker Chicago police and people running in terror and fury. Grant Park was full of anger and violence. So it was with wonder and a full heart that I looked on images of Grant Park Tuesday night:
"Look at these people -- old, young, black and white -- I've never seen anything like it, "…