revere | May 16, 2008At this moment I'm sitting in a Chicago O'Hare airport waiting room reading a news article on MSNBC's website telling me I am in more danger from breathing the air here in the terminal than I would be breathing the air on the airplane when it reaches cruising altitude. This was the conclusion from a just published study done by the National Institute for Occupational Study and Health (NIOSH), the federal research agency on workplace health problems, and two collaborating universities, Harvard and University of Massachusetts. NIOSH has been looking into the environment of the cabin crews, but…
revere | May 15, 2008Last week WHO's flu maven, Keiji Fukuda, said what we and others have been saying for a long time. Flu scientists need to change their research ethics. The world of flu virology has developed a mandarinate that is impeding progress for its own benefit. And their bad behavior is enabled and imitated by some public health agencies, like CDC. Researchers and CDC are sitting on H5N1 genetic and other flu sequences of public health importance. They treat their data as proprietary, to be used for their own benefit in scientific publications.
This isn't unusual. It is the normal way of doing…
revere | May 14, 2008For all you climate change deniers out there dismayed at John McSame's apparent embrace of global warming, you have nothing to fear:
John McCain had the eager press lined up on this one for weeks. He was going to take a stand and differentiate himself from Bush by offering his solution to climate change. And today was the momentous day. McCain made his speech and no less than the New York Times dutifully trotted out an article titled McCain Differs With Bush on Climate Change. (Devilstower at Daily Kos)
The 71% of the electorate thinks the globe is warming and of these, human activity is…
revere | May 13, 2008Second Life is a virtual reality site, superficially similar to some massive multiplayer role playing games one finds on the net (like World of Warcraft). But it's not a game but a social venue. I've tried it out and posted on or mentioned it several times (here, here, here and here). Second Life is a global phenomenon, not just a US one. Now Spanish public health officials are trying it out as a way to reach young people about drugs and sexually transmitted diseases:
Real doctors will log on and offer advice to their anonymous patients. What both will see is an image of a consulting room…
revere | May 12, 2008Suppose someone owned and managed business premises which had recently experienced a dangerous incident. They were also carrying out work there that was generally acknowledged by the industry to be risky. But when a government official came around they misrepresented the earlier incident and publicly denied they were engaging in any risky practices. The government official wasn't too inquisitive and told them it was OK by him to use the risky technique. So they continued to do so and six of their workers died as a result along with three rescue workers. What would you say about such a…
revere | May 11, 2008The subject of a recent post, rabies, put us in mind of another rare, invariably fatal neurodegenerative disease, Creutzfeld-Jakob Disease (CJD). There is now pretty good evidence that the outbreak of CJD in Europe since the 1990s is caused by the same agent that causes Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), also known as mad cow disease. The incriminated transmissible material is an unconventional agent, an infectious protein (now called a prion). When a prion from a BSE case in cattle is consumed it causes a disease very like CJD in humans. Technically it is called new variant CJD (nvCJD…
revere | May 11, 2008Let's face it. Tolerance for other religions is bad for religion. As long as people only knew about their own religion (translation: their parents' religion) they didn't question it. As soon as they became aware there were a lot of religions and theirs only one among them, then the question of why this one rather than that one raised its ugly head. Religious instruction is sometimes smuggled into public school under the guise of "comparative religion" but that will only hasten its down fall. Once people know there are not dozens but hundreds of religions, the inevitable question arises. Which…
revere | May 10, 2008We talk a fair amount about intellectual property issues here. When it comes to the free exchange of scientific information already paid for by taxpayers or the rapacious use of intellectual property laws by Big Pharma to price gouge the developed world and pillage the developing world the connections to public health are clear to us. Maybe some of you thought they were a stretch but now we have agreement from an unlikely source: the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. Of course their take is 180 degrees in the opposite direction. For them it's infringement that's the public health and…
revere | May 9, 2008Last October (2007) a 46 year old Minnesota man died of rabies, the only known victim in the US last year. Rabies is a rare disease in the US because we have good veterinary services. Most animals in routine and regular contact with humans are vaccinated against the disease. But bats have become a significant wild animal reservoir and the Minnesota case was a bat case:
Once rabies was suspected, the patient's family was interviewed on October 16 for a history of potential exposure. According to his family, the patient had handled a bat with his bare hands in a semi-open cabin porch in north-…
revere | May 8, 2008We seem to be doing a lot of vaccination stuff here lately. It's an obvious public health topic, one that's in the news and (in some quarters) considered controversial. I'm a strong proponent of vaccination where it makes sense (which is in most of the instances where it is used) but that doesn't mean I think it is problem free. For a public health scientist the problems are not only interesting but of practical import. Yesterday's post about fainting during vaccinations produced an unexpected comment thread from people who have at one time or another fainted during a vaccination or medical…
revere | May 7, 2008Vaccination against most childhood diseases is important for the overall health of the community. I've said that many times here and most recently, along with my Sciblings, bemoaned an increasing trend to refusing vaccination. The health related reasons for refusing to be vaccinated are largely based on false information, but that doesn't mean that when millions of people are being vaccinated something untoward doesn't happen. Usually what happens is innocuous and self-limiting. The person (often an adolescent) faints. We don't know how often that happens, but a recent effort by CDC has tried…
revere | May 6, 2008The AP has a story that a task force composed of medical and other experts from academia, professional groups, the military and government executive branches and agencies like the Department of Homeland Security, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Health and Human Services has been considering how to ration scarce medical resources in the event of a pandemic. Before I give you their suggested answer I want to consider the underlying problem. This may be too abstract a way for some to think about this, but it is the logical bare bones of the matter.
Suppose…
revere | May 5, 2008Mrs. R. and I visited Australia a number of years back. She was the one attending a scientific congress while I was the accompanying spouse. Quite nice, really. I enjoyed not having to work on a foreign visit. And Australia was terrific. We loved it. I was surprised at how good the food was (a baseless prejudice I had about Commonwealth Cuisine) and the people hospitable and friendly. Much like America, really. Unfortunately the Australian government is becoming too much like the US government when it comes to interfering in science:
A paper recently published in the Australian and New…
revere | May 4, 2008A democratic party superdelegate answers Senator Clinton's challenge to repudiate her vote phishing:
"Senator Clinton claimed yesterday that I either stand with her on this proposal or stand with the oil companies. To that I say: I stand with the families of Colorado, who aren't looking for bumper sticker fixes that don't fix anything, but for meaningful change that brings real relief and a new direction for our energy policy. We can't afford more Washington-style pandering while families keep getting squeezed."
-- Congressperson, Senate candidate, and uncommitted superdelegate Mark Udall of…
revere | May 4, 2008Let's stray from the Path of Wrighteousness and listen to some other spiritual leaders close to one of the Presidential Candidates. I don't know who Senator Clinton's God Guru is (I'm guessing that depends on what is most expedient at the moment; the Great God of Gas Tax Holidays seems favored as I write) but we know who Senator McCain courted. He's twice as spiritual as Senator Obama because he has at least two big time religious leaders on board, Pastors Hagee and Parsley (NB: Parsley is his name, not his position in the Living Kingdom). Here are some quotable Words of Wisdom from the two…
revere | May 3, 2008In other parts of the world measles is a major killer of children and infants. In my own youth measles was a very troublesome childhood disease that was a major cause of morbidity in the US, with 3 to 4 million cases a year. One in 250 died, almost 50,000 a year were hospitalized and 1000 were left with long term disability. Then, in 1963, measles vaccination was introduced. Since 1997 there have been less than 150 cases a year, mostly less than 100.
Except this year:
However, during January 1--April 25, 2008, a total of 64 confirmed measles cases were preliminarily reported to CDC, the most…
revere | May 2, 2008I'll admit I don't keep up with what's going on in the world of robotics, so I was pretty stunned a couple of months ago when a reader sent us this link to the promo for Boston Dynamics Big Dog robot. It's a longish clip, but this is a pretty amazing beast (I use the word deliberately). As long as its only used to fight other robots I won't worry too much, but I suspect that's not the Defense Department's plan:
It's pretty clear the world of robotics is moving ahead pretty fast. There's a ton of stuff on the net about some remarkable devices, including Honda's Asimo, that walks just like a…
revere | May 1, 2008Whenever the big dog over the back fence barks, our little dog goes racing to the back door, barking like crazy. Forget the fact that if the two dogs actually came muzzle to muzzle, the other dog would eat ours with one mouthful. On the other hand, when dogs bark on television, our dog either lifts her head briefly or keeps on snoozing. I often wondered if dog barks meant anything except making dog noise. You can still assume dogs communicate without requiring them to do it through through barking. And if barking means something, is it just the barks of a dog's own breed or is their cross-…
revere | April 30, 2008Every day seems to bring a new story about the crap we are leaving strewn around our environment. Not just trash but chemical trash, the kind of stuff we eat, pop as pills or dispose of and which winds up as molecules in our air, water and food. You may think you know more than you want to about this but in fact you know very little about it because no one knows much about it. For example, there are no systematic measurements of the stuff in the raw water that goes into our water treatment plants, facilities designed to handle micro-organisms and not chemicals. The EPA has a program called…
revere | April 29, 2008We've covered the FDA failure leading to their overlooking benzene in soda pretty often (at least if pretty often means here, here, here, here, here, here and here). It's like the guy who went to the doctor complaining of pain in his belly. "Ever have it before?" the doctor asked. "Yes, twice" the patient said. "Well, you have it again."
In this installment we learn that the benzene, a known human carcinogen, doesn't really have to be there. Recall how it got there. Two preservatives commonly added to soft drinks, ascorbic acid (Vitamin C) and sodium benzoate, react to produce the benzene…