revere | February 22, 2010This is our 10th post on the anthrax attacks. Will it be our last? Yes, if the FBI has anything to say about it. They are closing the case. A case they messed up pretty thoroughly from the outset but now want us to believe they've solved, even though the culprit they fingered, Dr. Bruce Ivins, a bioweapons researcher at Fort Detrick, allegedly committed suicide and wasn't available to interrogate. I say "allegedly" because there are other explanations for his demise, most plausibly in our view, an accident involving interaction of alcohol and acetaminophen which caused liver failure. But the…
revere | February 21, 2010This clip is long -- about 20 minutes -- but fascinating. I was never bored. Not for a moment. It's a talk given at the 2006 TED Conference in Monterey by Professor Hans Rosling of Sweden's Karolinska Institute. It's about . . . well you decide what this is about. It starts out being about international health and global development and winds up being about data, data access and data presentation. A tour de force:
revere | February 21, 2010This is a warning. The clips below are offensive. The second one I've had sitting on my text editor for a couple of weeks and had decided it was too offensive to use in the Sermonette. Whatever some of you may think (assuming you think), this space is not designed to be offensive to religion. I couldn't care less about anyone else's religious views as long as they don't tell me I have to adopt their superstitions. I have enough superstitions of my own, but at least they're harmless (knock on wood!). I use this space for things I think are subversive of religion. Subversion is a subtle thing,…
revere | February 20, 2010The National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) has been conducted since 1957 and is one of the main instruments to get a glimpse at the health of the US population. The NHIS is a "multistage area probability design," or what many call cluster sampling. The idea is to first sample geographic areas in all 50 sates and the District of Columbia, where the area might be a county, a small adjoining group of counties in sparsely populated places or a metropolitan area where population is dense. The list of areas to be sampled has about 1900 entries and 428 are drawn at random, although all states are…
revere | February 19, 2010The UK has some of the worst libel laws in the world, heavily stacked in favor of those claiming almost any criticism is libel. Perhaps it is a carry over from the days when the upper class brooked no criticism, I don't know, but I was glad to sign a petition calling for reform of these ridiculous laws. The reason I, as a science blogger, would object are well illustrated by two high profile cases, one involving a science writer, Simon Singh, the other a Danish scientist, Henrik Thomsen. Here is the merest sketch of the Singh case, followed by the Thomsen case, including developments in the…
revere | February 18, 2010When I first started teaching as an academic and told my family I taught 6 hours a week, they probably thought I had it pretty easy. I'm also sure they wondered what I did the rest of the time. Teaching a couple of new courses is a big job and it often absorbs more than the usual 40 hour week, but it's hard to account for your time. The same with writing grants. The idea that writing my grant (I can hear the groans, already; he's not going to talk about that again, is he?) is going to occupy 7 days a week until it's due at the beginning of April probably sounds inexplicable and impossible to…
revere | February 17, 2010Congratulations, North Carolina. You are getting brand new $52 million facility for your State Public Health Laboratory and Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, each in separate wings of a 220,000 square foot facility in Raleigh. Sounds great. But if you work there you might want to shower at home and bring bottled water. And better check your benefits. Because the company that got the contract is non other than Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR), until recently a Halliburton subsidiary and notorious Iraq contractor under investigation for shoddy electrical work resulting in the electrocution…
revere | February 16, 2010When I heard ace flu reporter Helen Branswell was covering the Olympics, I said to myself, "Hey, if she can do it, so can I!" So I'm covering the Olympics:
revere | February 15, 2010Studying the efficacy (effect under controlled conditions) and effectiveness (effect under real world conditions) of vaccines is a tricky business we've talked a lot about here. How do you know when someone has really gotten the vaccine? Just because you stuck the needle into them? That's a pretty good indication, but it might not be all the information you need. Their weight might be another. And the length of the needle used still another:
In a new study, the researchers report that using a standard 1-inch needle to immunize obese adolescents against hepatitis B virus produced a much weaker…
revere | February 14, 2010The mosquito is the vector for diseases like malaria, yellow fever and West Nile. They are major scourges of public health, and while we have sunk a fair amount of money in drying to eradicate them, we haven't put as much money into developing the technology for the war on mosquitoes as the war on other humans. Think of the Star Wars Initiative and the investment and difficult of zapping a single missile before it hits an population area. The technology is super expensive (and super profitable for defense contractors. And so far nobody has been able to make it work. The idea of shooting a…
revere | February 14, 2010If I have to work on my grant on a Sunday morning, then you have to watch this. Penance. Because you aren't in Sunday School:
revere | February 13, 20102009 was a dismal year, economically speaking -- unless you were a health insurer:
If no health care overhaul passes Congress, health insurers may be in for a windfall -- and one far larger that most Americans probably realize.
According to a study by a pro-health reform group published Thursday, the nation's largest five health insurance companies posted a 56 percent gain in 2009 profits over 2008. The insurers including Wellpoint, UnitedHealth, Cigna, Aetna and Humana, which cover the majority of Americans with insurance.
The insurers' hefty profit gains came even as 2.7 million more…
revere | February 12, 2010We've written quite a bit about statins because there is evidence that these plentiful and cheap drugs may be useful in treating or preventing the innate immune system's catastrophic dysregulation sometimes called "cytokine storm" (see here, here, here, here, here for a few examples). A new study now suggests that daily statin use by people under 75 may also lead to a significant (40%) reduction in cataracts. This from a study in Epidemiology of 180,000 patients seen between 1998 and 2007 in Israel:
Dr. [Gabriel] Chodick and his colleague Dr. Varda Shalev found that men aged 45 to 54 who took…
revere | February 11, 2010I admit there are some medical articles I just read the press release for. They are almost always articles in journals I don't have easy access to and don't read regularly, but when I run across a press release I find interesting enough to read and maybe post about, it often isn't so compelling I'm going to go out and read the article. It's just mildly interesting and for my purposes the details aren't as important as the main ideas. If you guessed that I'm going to do that now, you'd be right. It's about an article in The Journal of Trauma Injury, Infection, and Critical Care from…
revere | February 10, 2010I'm a scientist and my research is supported by NIH, i.e., by American taxpayers. More importantly, the science I do is for anyone to use. I claim no proprietary rights. That's what science is all about. We make our computer code publicly available, not just by request, but posted on the internet, and it is usable code: commented and documented. We ask the scientists in our program to do the same with the reagents they develop. Reagents are things like genetic probes or antibodies directed against specific targets mentioned in the articles they publish. There is an list of the reagents on the…
revere | February 9, 2010Like tens of millions (probably hundreds of millions globally) I watched the Superbowl on Sunday. With such an audience, ad time is notoriously and extravagantly expensive and some ads are only run once, at that venue (e.g., the famous Apple "1984" ad). For some people the ads are as much an attraction as the game, so it is sad to report that this year they were relatively unfunny and, as one blogger noted, unusually ugly and misogynist in flavor. But the ad that has drawn the attention of those interested in a cleaner and greener world was from automaker Audi and it has drawn two very…
revere | February 8, 2010Most people feel safe at home, but statistically it's not the safest place to be, at least in terms of being injured (here injury includes not only trauma but poisoning, but if we restrict it to trauma probably little is changed). Here's one of CDC's "Quickstat" looks at the percentage distribution of injuries by place of occurrence, as reported in a cluster sample of the US population (the National Health Interview Survey). The years covered are 2004 to 2007:
Source: Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR)
Here's how the NHIS defined these places: home includes both inside and outside…
revere | February 7, 2010I know families that if you visited them and found them laughing, confused, dizzy, thirsty and vomiting and apparently hallucinating you would think, "everything's normal." On a July night in suburban Maryland, however, an after dinner social call by a relative didn't think it was normal at all and EMTs were called and six adults were headed for the hospital, five to the intensive care unit. Attention immediately focused on what they all had in common, a meal of stew and bread an hour earlier:
On admission to the emergency department, two of the six patients were unconscious. The other four…
revere | February 6, 2010Everyone knows, because the the Main Stream Media tells us, that bloggers aren't journalists. I freely admit I am not a journalist, not even a science journalist. Of course I do report a lot of science here and I know I do it better and more accurately than many a science reporter, but there are science journalists like Helen Branswell, who is not a scientist, and can run circles around amateurs like me. Unfortunately there aren't many of Branswells in the MSM these days, so when we report what's in a breaking science paper I think we do it as well or better than most non scientist…