revere | April 28, 2008On a couple of occasions (here, here) we've taken note of the scientific controversy regarding the plasticizer, bisphenol-A (BPA). I shouldn't really put it this way, because as the leading BPA researcher, Fred vom Saal of the Univeristy of Missouri said in the Washington Post over the weekend, there is no meaningful controversy any longer. Now that NIH's National Toxicology Program has finally presented its draft report on BPA expressing concern over possible carcinogenic and developmental effects, vom Saal's statement seems pertinent:
"The scientific community basically said, 'This argument…
revere | April 27, 2008The Reveres caucused this weekend and finally decided that with summer coming on and the academic and flu seasons ending this would be a good time to lighten up on our twice a day posting. There may even be days with no posts at all.
In truth we have found the posting schedule wearing. This blog hasn't gone dark a single day since the end of 2004 and the strain is beginning to take a toll on us. We still have extremely active professional lives and many responsibilities in "meat space." The inartful nature of our blogging may not look like it, but this activity takes many hours daily and we…
revere | April 27, 2008The more things change the more they get weirder. In my day, the only way you could be a Conscientious Objector was to claim that status on religious grounds. If you were an atheist, tough shit. Now if you are an atheist, they don't want you to fight. This is something for all you young folks to keep in mind when President McSame or President Hilary get us involved in a war with Iran and they have to re-institute conscription:
When Specialist Jeremy Hall held a meeting last July for atheists and freethinkers at Camp Speicher in Iraq, he was excited, he said, to see an officer attending.
But…
revere | April 26, 2008We frequently observe here that almost everything in public health, from the societal level to the molecular level, is a balancing act. With most benefits comes a risk and with many risks a benefit. Of course there is a problem when the benefits and risks accrue to different parties as when the public runs the risks and the corporation gets the benefits. So that's one problem in making the trade-offs. Another is when the risks and benefits are completely different, essentially non-comparable. We often try to solve this by measuring them on a common scale like total number of lives saved or…
revere | April 25, 2008When I read about this Japanese robot designed to clean urinals that was made to look like a stylized elephant I was reminded of a joke. First the robot, then the joke.
Here's a pic of the robot followed by a machine translation of the Japanese Press Release (courtesy 3Yen, hat tip Boingboing):
The "DCBA" men's room cleaning robot
Robot.Watch, Impress.co.jp 2008 April 22 (edited translation)--On April 17, 2008, MERTEC Company unveiled a urinal cleaning robot, the "DCBA" in Kobe Airport terminal....
...Mr. Susumu Kanai was in charge of the design of the DCBA. He said that, " I imaged a…
revere | April 25, 2008For years we have been naming flu viruses in a particular way. Now Declan Butler has a news article in Nature observing that the system is being modified for bird flu to be more "politically correct." What is the system that's being modified (still in use for seasonal flu)?
It starts off with the type of influenza virus, either A, B or C. The type was originally based on a broad class of antibody response but now is related to genetic markers in two of the eleven proteins (matrix M1 or nuceoprotein, NP). The three types have a common ancestor but only types A and B are of public health…
revere | April 24, 2008The art professor is finally cleared but a distinguished biologist was still punished by a ridiculous, mindless, cruel and utterly reckless use of raw power by the Bush administration:
A federal judge dismissed criminal indictments on Monday against an art professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo who was charged four years ago with mail and wire fraud after receiving bacteria through the mail that he said he planned to use in his art projects.
Judge Richard J. Arcara of the U.S. District Court in Buffalo ruled that the indictment against the professor, Steven J. Kurtz, was "…
revere | April 24, 2008In the previous two posts (here and here) we laid out some new results that dissect what might be happening at the molecular level when a patient infected with SARS or bird flu descends into Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS) from Acute Lung Injury (ALI) in a just published paper in the journal Cell (Imai et al., "Identification of Oxidative Stress and Toll-like Receptor 4 Signaling as a Key Pathway of Acute Lung Injury", Cell, Vol 133, 235-249, 18 April 2008). We have already discussed their experiments showing that TLR4, a receptor that is part of the innate immune system, was…
revere | April 23, 2008A viral infection with serious public health consequences occurred in Canada on January with little publicity:
Hundreds of computers at the Public Health Agency of Canada fell victim to a "worm," a bit of malicious software that nearly brought operations to a halt.
The trouble began Monday, Jan. 15, 2007, when a few computer users at the agency and at Health Canada reported getting error messages. The worm eventually knocked out 1,308 or 80 per cent of work stations in three cities and took more than a month to eradicate, say newly released documents.
The attack is estimated to have cost the…
revere | April 23, 2008In our previous post we set the stage for discussing the results of a significant new paper by Imai et al. and colleagues on the mechanism of lung damage from diverse pathogens, including SARS, bird flu H5N1, 1918 H1N1 flu, inhalational anthrax and Monkeypox. If this work is verified it is a major step forward in our understanding of how the devastating consequences of Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS) and Acute Lung Injury (ALI) come about and may well provide clues about how to treat what is still an essentially untreatable and catastrophic medical condition.
There are two main…
revere | April 22, 2008It's kind of strange when suddenly there are a lot of articles on growing meat in a vat (it's probably because there was a recent conference in Norway on the topic). Even we posted on it last week and today the New York Times tells us that PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals - scientists excepted), the militant and sometimes violent animal rights group, is offering a $1 million prize for the "first person to come up with a method to produce commercially viable quantities of in vitro meat at competitive prices by 2012":
Jason Matheny, a doctoral student at Johns Hopkins…
revere | April 22, 2008The cells of your body don't just sit there, unmindful of what is going on around them. They have to respond to things, even cooperate with other cells to get things done for the common good. Humans do the same thing. We've developed a system of signaling to each other using an intricate vocal system, a complex grammar, ears, eyes and smell detecting systems. It's a very complicated package with a lot of moving parts. It's not so surprising, then, that cells also have complex signaling systems with a lot of parts that they use to respond to their environment. Just as we sometimes make a…
revere | April 21, 2008"Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive pollute." I know it doesn't rhyme. But the tangled web is real:
Songbirds feeding near the contaminated South River are showing high levels of mercury, even though they aren't eating food from the river itself, according to a paper published by William and Mary researchers in the journal Science.
Lead author Dan Cristol said his paper has wide-ranging international environmental implications. Mercury is one of the world's most troublesome pollutants, especially in water. The South River, a major tributary of Virginia's…
revere | April 21, 2008There's an epidemic of a viral disease in Florida, although you wouldn't know it unless you were a vegetable or a farmer:
In recent years, the number of whitefly-transmitted viruses in cucurbit fields, home to crops like cucumbers, squashes, pumpkins, melons and watermelons, has increased to almost epidemic proportions in Florida.
Researchers led by plant pathologists Scott Adkins and Bill Turechek at the ARS Subtropical Plant Pathology Research Unit in Fort Pierce, Fla., are dealing with a "triple threat" to cucurbits: three major viruses, all transmitted by silverleaf whitefly, Bemisia…
revere | April 20, 2008The National Post recently had an interesting article on "disease mongering," an article I largely agreed with. The major point was that fostering a fear of "germs," promoting the idea that following medical advice, especially advice involving "taking your pills," and the very definition of who is diseased and who is not has a suspiciously commercial aspect.
Consider the marketing of hand sanitizers, a subject of interest to the flu obsessed:
The slogan of Purell -- a hand sanitizer manufactured by Pfizer -- is "Imagine a Touchable World." It's hard to miss the implication that the world in…
revere | April 20, 2008This being a public health blog and all, we thought an emphasis on prevention was appropriate. Here's how to practice damnation hygiene:
revere | April 19, 2008Every once in a while Scienceblogs (through its publisher, Seed Magazine) gets a question from a reader that is circulated to see if one or more of the bloggers wants to take a crack at answering it. Recently a 9 year old wanted to know what is in the air we breathe (chemically speaking). On its face it seems like a pretty straightforward question, answerable by looking it up in a reference book, but it is not really so straightforward until you pin it down a little more. Let's parse the question so we can handle it better.
First, what are we talking about when we talk about "the air"? In…
revere | April 18, 2008The occupational disease in slaughterhouse workers who extract pig brains using compressed air is growing in number. It is still small because this process seems to be uncommon. We first discussed it last December when there were 11 cases and its origin was uncertain. It didn't have an official name, although it was identified as a chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy (CIDP). There were 11 cases then. In February we did a follow-up after CDC published a preliminary report that confirmed the relationship with the compressed air process in the original set of Minnesota patients (…
revere | April 18, 2008If you want to know how far we've come since the early days of discussing community preparations for a possible influenza pandemic, take a look at a story at CIDRAP News about a new guidance document prepared by the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials (ASTHO) and its partners. This is described as the first federal document of its kind prepared outside the federal government (although with a grant from CDC). It's about how to provide necessary resources and services to those who will need it most but who are also the hardest to reach. The 105 page document is aimed at state…
revere | April 17, 2008In July 2005 when there was a terrorist bombing in the London subway system the FBI, using a perfectly valid and legal subpoena, asked for and obtained documents from North Carolina State University about a possible conspirator. That apparently wasn't good enough for the FBI. They wanted the agent to get the documents using a National Security Letter under the USA Patriot Act. They made him return the documents and then issue a NSL:
Under the USA Patriot Act, FBI counterterrorism investigators can self-issue such letters to get phone records, portions of credit reports and bank records,…