revere | July 6, 2008It's not bad enough that the professional heart of CDC is heading for the exits as fast as they can get there in response to the high handed, abrasive and incompetent management of its Director, Dr. Julie Gerberding. Not bad enough at all. Dr. Gerberding now is getting rid of good people who haven't voluntarily jumped ship. Celeste Montforton at the public health blog, The Pump Handle, where we sometimes post and which is one of the mainstays of the public health blogosphere, brings us news that Dr. John Howard, Director for the last six years of the National Institute of Occupational Health…
revere | July 5, 2008Three food safety stories in the news this Fourth of July weekend. All three are worrisome but the third is the most worrisome of all. What are the first two?
You know them. The first is the largest produce associated multistate Salmonella outbreak on record (now over 900 cases in 40 states) rages on. Have they found the contaminated tomatoes? No. But now they think the tomatoes might be jalapeno peppers. Or maybe cilantro:
Investigators are seeing more signs that the salmonella outbreak blamed on tomatoes might have been caused by tainted jalapeno peppers and have begun collecting samples…
revere | July 4, 2008Maybe you already know about net neutrality or have heard of it. If you haven't, American Independence Day seems a particularly apt time to bring you the message, since it's all about the independence of the internet. If you read this and other blogs, you probably already value the freedom of the internet. I don't like a lot of the stuff but I do appreciate that whatever my interests or concerns or politics I can find a place on the internet that caters to it. I certainly don't want my ISP, the much and justly hated Comcast Company, or Verizon or Time Warner or any of the other corporate…
revere | July 3, 2008Morally-challenged Attorney General Michael Mukasey can't figure out whether waterboarding is torture or not -- he seems to think it is an open question -- but there is nothing stopping him from following the example of fellowdoubter Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens is a flagrant Iraq War cheerleader who had earlier parsed waterboarding as a form of "extreme interrogation" rather than torture. Accusing him of torturing the language, critics suggested he get waterboarded himself and then say whether he thought it was torture or not. The Guardian reports that Hitchens has just published his…
revere | July 2, 2008There is a lot of science stuff in newspapers that is just (barely) warmed over press releases from companies or universities. They get pushed out into the world via aggregating services like Eurekalert. Lots of science bloggers and journalists use this stuff for ideas and sources, but even when the origin is a university you have to be circumspect. Some of it is gross over reaching, probably by scientists being pushed by university media relations types trying to get some ink for their institution and not caring how much sense it makes. At least that's how I read this piece on Eurekalert…
revere | July 1, 2008As the tomato Salmonella outbreak heads past the 800 case level, it's time to ask some questions about why we don't know the source of what is the largest produce associated disease outbreak on record. CDC has its own explanation, namely, that figuring out where tomatoes come from and where they go is much harder than they thought. Said another way, the experts in foodborne disease outbreaks at CDC and FDA didn't know much about the industry. Since tomatoes have been a frequent cause of Salmonella outbreaks, that seems odd, except that my experience with CDC in recent years is that it is full…
revere | June 30, 2008We started blogging on public health at the beginning of the 2004 - 2005 flu season, although we didn't concentrate on flu immediately. We intended to use the public health problem of influenza, a disease that contributes to the death of almost 40,000 US citizens a year, as a lens through which to look at public health. The interest in bird flu and pandemic flu followed naturally. The intervening years saw seasonal influenza outbreaks that were milder than previous years, but this resourceful virus made a comeback in the flu season just concluded. CDC has just summarized the 2007 - 2008 flu…
revere | June 29, 2008We take for it granted that technology can be used to tag objects in various ways, useful and otherwise. The anti-theft devices used on retail clothing stores are a familiar example. Radio Frequency Identification Devices (RFID) are used for this purpose as well as for security access. I have a device like that on my windshield for automatic highway tolls on the turnpike. Hospitals also have a strong interest in keeping track of lots of items like pharmaceuticals, equipment or even ordinary sponges used in surgery. Counting and keeping track of sponges is routine so none are inadvertently…
revere | June 29, 2008This week we lost George Carlin. I only saw him once in person, sometime in the early seventies or maybe late sixties. He was already wildly popular and Mrs. R. and I weren't too flush with disposable income so we wound up sitting in the stratosphere of a gigantic theater, stuffed to the gills with Carlin fans. He was a tiny figure on stage from our altitude, but up close and personal with his hilarious routine. While electronic traces of that hilarious presence remain on YouTube and recordings of one kind or another (I still have "Class Clown" on vinyl), George Carlin the person is gone.…
revere | June 28, 2008I'm still trying to get my blood pressure under control over last week's House FISA vote that gives telecom companies immunity for illegal acts. The focus of my anger is not on Republicans. Republicans have shown themselves reliable enemies of civil liberties and everyone expects them to protect the fat cats. Their votes were asured. What sends me round the bend here are the members of the Democratic Party who caved on this issue. The measure is yet to be voted on in the Senate, but Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama has said he will vote for it. The entire FISA act is not needed…
revere | June 27, 2008Every time I write about the hazard of phones some readers flip out. The hazards of non-ionizing radiation, whatever the evidence (and it is controverted, difficult, ambiguous and contradictory), seems to acquire a junk science label from people who don't have much training or experience in evaluating the kind of evidence that forms the basis for some of the claims. OK, rant over. This isn't about the hazards of non-ionizing radiation. But it is about a health hazard from telephones:
Constantly cradling a telephone receiver between the shoulder and ear to free the hands for other work can…
revere | June 26, 2008Traveling and busy as hell, but wanted to share this. The ever expanding copyright laws is one of my pet peeves, but almost as irritating as the increasing length of copyright is the difficulty in knowing if something is still under copyright. The copyright date and name of the copyright holder in the frontmatter of a book is not a sufficient indication since it only tells you who used to have the copyright, not who does or does not have it now as a result of a renewal. For books published in the US between 11923 there is now a new tool to use:
For U.S. books published between 1923 and 1963,…
revere | June 25, 2008In our earlier discussion of the science behind greenhouse gases we pointed out that all objects radiate electromagnetic radiation, doing so at a peak wavelength dependent upon their surface temperatures. That means two things. One is that things at the usual temperatures in our world are radiating EM radiation at wavelengths characteristic of the far infrared region. The other is that by measuring the intensity of infrared you can also measure the surface temperature of the body without touching it. Commercial devices are touted as highly accurate. Clinicians use them to measure body "core…
revere | June 24, 2008One thing about the sixties. If you weren't there, it can be hard to understand the real message. For the age challenged, here is one of the great Beatles songs sung by the one-of-a-kind Joe Cocker at Woodstock in 1969, complete with subtitles so you can understand the words:
Hat tip Jesus General.
revere | June 24, 2008The Atlanta Journal Constitution (AJC) newspaper is the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) worst nightmare because it continually runs in depth stories about why CDC is the worst nightmare for scientists concerned with laboratory safety. CDC is the agency supposedly ensuring the public's safety from laboratories researching contagious disease causing organisms. They have their own research labs which they need for identification of unknown organisms or scientific work on agents of special importance. In the Bush years, this has often meant CDC has worked on biowarfare agents. One of those…
revere | June 23, 2008There is a great deal of activity on the bird flu vaccine front. Several different new techniques to make vaccines are being tested and so are additives to vaccines, called adjuvants, that boost the ability of the preparation to induce the body to make sufficient antibodies to protect us against infection. The smaller the dose needed for protection, the more people can be vaccinated for a given amount of production. Since we are talking about enough productive capacity to vaccinate a significant proportion of the world's population in the event of a catastrophic pandemic, this is obviously a…
revere | June 22, 2008The hardest and most dangerous agricultural work in the United States is not done by people who are citizens. It is done by immigrants. Some don't have proper documents but many do. Documents don't protect workers from dying. And agricultural workers die of heat stroke at 20 times the rate of other workers:
In mid-July 2005, a male Hispanic worker with an H-2A work visa (i.e., a temporary, nonimmigrant foreign worker hired under contract to perform farm work) aged 56 years was hand-harvesting ripe tobacco leaves on a North Carolina farm. He had arrived from Mexico 4 days earlier and was on…
revere | June 22, 2008Since it's a lazy summer weekend (the first of the summer, astronomically speaking -- that is, if you believe the earth goes around the sun), I was lazily contemplating some of the dumbass things said about one of my sciblings, PZ Myers, by another one of my sciblings, Matt Nisbet. The clip Matt embedded is no longer available (taken down at the insistence of the copyright holder; if it's so bad for the pro-science side, why did they take it down?), but it seems to be the infamous "religion is like knitting" clip. Since that clip is still up on YouTube, here it is again, in case you missed it…
revere | June 21, 2008The beach in Indonesia may look nice, but don't let that distract you:
There is an English word for deliberately neglecting to tell people something they have asked you about. It's called lying. On that basis, the Indonesian government, primarily in the person of their Minister of Health, Siti Fadillah Supari, are liars. They have publicly declared their intention to lie by announcing they will no longer notify the world promptly about new human cases of bird flu. The acknowledged motive is to improve the reputation of Indonesia in the eyes of the world. Currently the country is the world's…