revere | March 12, 2010When last we visited the US food safety system during the Bush administration it was busy serving up peanut butter with a side of Salmonella. That one caused over 4 thousand product recalls, 700 Salmonella cases and at least 9 deaths. Now it's Salmonella serovar Tennessee in hydrolyzed vegetable protein (HVP), a common flavor enhancer used in all sorts of food products, including, according to the FDA, soups, sauces, chilis, stews, hot dogs, gravies, seasoned snack foods, dips and dressings. An important difference -- so far -- is that there are no illnesses traced to the contaminated…
revere | March 11, 2010The latest study on flu vaccine effectiveness in children has been well discussed in the MSM and the flu blogs, so I'll point you to those excellent pieces (Branswell, crof, Mike Coston at Avian Flu Diary) and just add some things not covered elsewhere. The full text of the article is available for free at JAMA and it's a pretty good read, so if you want to see for yourself what is involved I urge you to read it, too. First, let me back up a bit and connect this to the controversy about observational and randomized clinical trials we've been discussing here of late (before my grant writing…
revere | March 10, 2010Why do I think that this will end badly? From the UK:
Japanese knotweed was first introduced as an ornamental plant in the 19th Century. But with no natural enemies in the UK it soon raged out of control, wiping out surrounding wildlife and even destroying buildings. The invasive species, that can grow up to 13ft tall and break through concrete, causes around £150 million worth of damage every year.
Gardeners tried starving it of water, soaking it in toxic weedkiller and simply just ripping it up, but nothing worked - until now.
A tiny insect called a psyllid, about the size of a grain of…
revere | March 9, 2010I'm not sure I completely understand the legal adage, "bad facts make bad law," but the Supreme Court may be about to give us all an object lesson in its meaning. If I do understand it, is that sometimes there are situations -- "bad facts" -- that are so unusual or so horrifying or both -- that they force jurists to make legal decisions in line with what any normal person would consider to be just but with unintended side effects that make "bad law," that is, bad legal precedent. An example is a Texas case where a drunk driver hit a car carrying a pregnant woman whose fetus was seriously…
revere | March 8, 2010There is so much tragedy and sadness in the wake of the earthquakes in Haiti and Chile that to bemoan the fate of research projects there seems kind of trivial. But if you are scientist your heart really goes out to your Chilean colleagues. Jocelyn Kaiser and Antonio Regalado have some details at ScienceInsider, Science Magazine's science blog:
Scientists at research universities in several Chilean cities are reeling from last week's earthquake, which overturned microscopes, set fire to laboratories, washed years of research out to sea, and took the life of a young marine biologist.…
revere | March 7, 2010Most of you don't want to hear about my grant writing any more, but some of you are clearly interested in one of our innovations (at least I think it's an innovation; I've never heard of anyone doing it on this scale before): the Mock Study Section. So I'll take a break from writing (actually, re-writing) to describe it. First I should explain to the uninitiated what a "Study Section" is.
In grantee parlance, the Study Section (also called a Scientific Review Group) is a committee of external scientists who review grant proposals and meet to discuss and grade them. There are many regular…
revere | March 6, 2010Two days ago I went with my daughter to the pediatrician to check out her 20 month old who had a fever and rash. Viral origin, probably. Also an ear infection. Pretty much par for the course at this time of year. But lots of little ones and their older sibs weren't so lucky this flu season. As we've had too many occasions to mention, the severity of the 2009 pandemic has yet to be gauged, but trying to compare it to seasonal flu is misleading as its epidemiology is very different. Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in the melancholy figures for pediatric deaths.
Since the beginning of…
revere | March 5, 2010I was surfing the other night after a long day of working on the grant and ran across this announcement (hat tip infosthetics) of a new kind of city map, one you don't have to fold but can crumple up. It's made of Tyvek, a soft but durable waterproof material you can crease anywhere you want or just jam it into your pocket, any old way. They aren't available just yet but will be soon for London, Paris, New York, Tokyo and Berlin. I'm not sure what the market for city maps will be when everyone is carrying around smartphones with GPS, but it put me in mind of something completely different, a…
revere | March 4, 2010I don't take vitamins or any other dietary supplements. I have another strategy. I eat a balanced diet. It was advice my father gave his patients about diet: everything in moderation. Moreover I don't trust Big Pharma or many of their subsidiaries or the independent Little Pharmas in the dietary supplements industry, which is notoriously poorly regulated. Those are my prejudices. I mention them so you can evaluate my brining you this little snippet from the news:
People who take certain brands of fish oil supplements, seeking benefits of Omega-3 fatty acids are also exposing themselves to…
revere | March 3, 2010The Reveres consider themselves progressives (check the masthead), a word used for people who believe government has a role to play to make the world better, but also tend to be social libertarians. Many scientists and doctors are progressive in that sense. But it's a mighty big tent, and apparently covers some folks whose politics I agree with on many issues but can still be very far from what progressives also call the "reality based community." Very far. Far, as in "they can't see it from where they are."
Literally:
Atlanta Progressive News has parted ways with long-serving senior staff…
revere | March 2, 2010This weekend I got a haircut and noticed for the umpteenth time that the hair from the top of my head (I still have plenty) that landed in my lap as I sat in the barber's chair was grey. This always surprises me because when I look in the mirror I don't have much grey hair. I have some, but not that much. When I look at old photos of myself I can see my hair is very dark and in more recent photos it is pretty grey, but not when I look in the mirror. I mentioned this today at grant writing meeting with our large team of investigators, some of whom are more or less my age, and one of them came…
revere | March 1, 2010It really gives me heartburn to see an otherwise sensible article in AOLNews by Katie Drummond with a headline: "Hyping H1N1: Did It Create a Dangerous Flu Fatigue?" I don't know if that was her title or not. Newspapers have headline writers who often seem never to have read the piece they are headlining, but online authors often title their own pieces. In any event, the word in the headline I object to is "Hyping." It implies deliberate exaggeration for ulterior motives.
Did many respectable news outlets do this? Some did, no doubt. They are businesses and news is the commodity they are…
revere | February 28, 2010Rabies is one of those diseases that scares the crap out of me. Once clinical symptoms start, it is essentially a death sentence. "Essentially" because there are 6 cases of survival in the medial record, but 5 of the 6 had had rabies vaccination prior to illness. A single case of survival in an unvaccinated case is on record, but only after a long period in intensive care. Now CDC is reporting an unusual case they are calling "abortive rabies." The patient was a 17 year old girl who had multiple hospitalizations for a variety of neurologic symptoms, including severe headache, vomiting and…
revere | February 28, 2010According to some notorious hate groups, the Obama administration is meeting with hate groups:
Some conservative commentators are accusing the Obama administration of inviting "hate groups" into the White House by holding a meeting with a coalition of secularist and atheist groups.
Officials from the Justice and Health and Human Services departments met Friday with representatives of the Secular Coalition for America, an umbrella group that includes American Atheists and the Council for Secular Humanism. The coalition called it "the first time in history a presidential administration has met…
revere | February 27, 2010Fifteen years isn't a long time. Most of us can remember what we were doing 15 years ago. Often it's the same thing we are doing now, job-wise. Sure our kids were just kids, not adults. But 15 years isn't a historical epoch. At least not when you are living through it. But the fact is we have gone through a revolution in that period that will seem as profound as the 50 years from 1450 to 1500, the half century after Gutenberg and the invention of moveable type.
It's hard to remember what the cyberworld was like a short 15 years ago, but thanks to the internet we can retrieve -- instantly --…
revere | February 26, 2010It is becoming conventional wisdom that the 2009 H1N1 pandemic was not as severe as a bad seasonal flu year. That might be true, although I don't find it much comfort because a bad seasonal flu year is no less bad for being more familiar. But I am not yet willing to assent to the conventional wisdom yet. I don't think we have had sufficient time to collate all the information that would enable us to make that kind of judgment, which sometimes takes years to evaluate. However bad it was or wasn't, the pandemic flu strain could kill you just as dead as any other flu. CDC has just released…
revere | February 25, 2010If I screamed every time I wanted to scream after reading something on the internet, I'd be so hoarse I wouldn't be able to scream about something I hadn't read on the internet. Like the Obama administration's loser mentality or the Republican Party as just plain losers with no mentality at all. So maybe I won't scream about what I read about on The Guardian today (hat tip Boingboing), but I'd like to scream. LIKE THIS. But why should you listen to me? I'm an Enemy of the State. I know this because the US-based International Intellectual Property Alliance has made it clear what kind of person…
revere | February 24, 2010This post contains an oldie but (fairly) goodie YouTube clip about PowerPoint (.ppt). I hate PowerPoint although I use it a lot out of laziness. I've been lecturing a long time and for at least half of it there was no such things as .ppt. If you had data you wanted to show, you thought long and hard about which graphs or tables because each yellow letters on blue background kodachrome slide cost $8 to $15 so you only made up ones about things you couldn't talk about from your notes or write/draw on the blackboard. I used the blackboard a lot as a lecturer because I had a tendency to talk…
revere | February 23, 2010Still working on the grant and today was our Mock Study Section. It was an experiment that in the view of all participants (there were about 35 reviewers in the room) was a highly successful one. But after hearing the litany of strengths and weaknesses I'm worn out. I naturally focussed on the weaknesses. We have over a month to fix things but the image of the ship going down swam before my eyes, even when surfing for blog fodder:
In October 2009 the government of Italy announced that a wreck discovered off the southwestern tip of the country is the Catania, a passenger vessel sunk during…