revere | April 17, 2008Peter Doshi has a bone to pick with CDC . His particular idée fixe is that CDC is cooking the books on their estimates of excess mortality attributable to influenza and he aims to set the record straight. He's done it before. Doshi is not the kind of critic CDC is used to. He is a graduate student, not an established public health figure. But he's no shrinking violet and is getting in CDC's face again in the latest issue of the American Journal of Public Health. This time Doshi extends his criticism to imply CDC is pandemic fear mongering, perhaps in collusion with Big Pharma. This has been…
revere | April 16, 2008Thanks to a local health officer in Colorado I get word that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has begun an investigation of claims made by my favorite infomercial quacks, the Kinoki Foot Bad folks (see my howl of pain in the post The TV ad that DRIVES ME CRAZY). Here's some of the AP story:
Late night television infomercials seem to have a cheap fix for anything: lose weight, banish cellulite or improve conditions like diabetes, arthritis and insomnia.
Or, all of the above.
Ads for Kinoki Foot Pads made exactly that bold claim, saying the pads use secrets of ancient Japanese medicine…
revere | April 16, 2008Because of bird flu I probably spend too much time thinking about the world's industrially produced poultry. Arguably these chicken factories, with tens of thousands of birds crammed together under the most unsanitary conditions are the perfect bioreactor for virulent bird viruses, like influenza A/H5N1. They exit because chicken meat is a good source of relatively low cost protein and global appetite for Chicken McNuggets and its culinary cousins. So I guess we have to live with this vile industry. Or do we?
About a year and half ago I posted on growing meat in tissue culture. It got a very…
revere | April 15, 2008I haven't posted on the vaccine/autism question for several reasons. It is quite well covered by other science bloggers, it tends to generate more heat than light, and we didn't have anything new to say. I have on several occasions discussed it with two of the world's top experts on the health effects of mercury and one of the world's top autism experts. None of the three felt there was a vaccine-mercury connection to autism. But news that the US government was going to include vaccine critics in shaping national vaccine policy made me change my mind about posting. I won't be addressing the…
revere | April 15, 2008US Secretary of Health and Human Services, Michael Leavitt, is in Indonesia to discuss matters of mutual interest with the Indonesian government. Topic number one was the Indonesian government's opt out of the international influenza surveillance system which has been in place for almost 60 years and provides vital information on what flu strains to include in the next year's seasonal flu shots. But the system is not limited to seasonal influenza and is an important part of the global surveillance of all influenza viruses that might be of human health concern, chiefly among the non-seasonal…
revere | April 14, 2008Boingboing had a short notice about the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) Fatality Analysis Reporting System ("FARS"), plugging it as an all purpose dicing and slicing source for information on motor vehicle related deaths in the US. You can make your own custom queries to find out about auto fatalities in your own county. FARS is a great resource. But there is another one, hosted at CDC, that is even better: WISQARS (Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System, "whiskers").
WISQARS reports injury statistics for each state over time. You can also compare your…
revere | April 14, 2008I'm a supporter of mathematical modeling as another way to get a handle on what might happen in an influenza pandemic. But a recent paper by the group at London's Imperial College, published in Nature, shows what can happen when modelers allow their work to bear more weight than it can sustain. When a prestigious scientific journal, Nature, publishes such a paper, it also gets attention it wouldn't get if published in a more appropriate place -- meaning a place where its scientific contribution could be judged in the usual way, not under the glare of global publicity. I'm not blaming the wire…
revere | April 13, 2008Since we posted here less than a week ago on a recent paper authored by Chinese and US scientists in The Lancet giving scientific details confirming what most people had already assumed was a person to person transmission of H5N1 between a father and son, it was with considerable surprise we read the headline of a story from wire service Agency France Presse (AFP) claiming that Chinese authorities had "rejected a study which found a probable case of human-to-human bird flu transmission in the country, state media reported." On the one hand we were hesitant to accept this report at face value…
revere | April 13, 2008Is a report about aliens less believable than a report that someone rose from the dead? You have to admit, this guy has a point:
revere | April 12, 2008If you want to know the single most important class of public health interventions with respect to infectious diseases in the 20th century it wasn't vaccines but provision of clean water and food supplies. But vaccines may be next. With major waterborne diseases like typhoid and cholera under control, the next big category of infectious diseases was the major childhood ailments: measles, German measles (aka rubella), mumps, chickenpox, polio, diphtheria, whooping cough. Some were just memories by the time I came along (diphtheria, pertussis), one was conquered in my younger years, the others…
revere | April 11, 2008Faith-based disaster relief sounds a bit like a contradiction to me. Why did God send the disaster in the first place? But what do I know. I'm an atheist. I'm also an American, however, and it seems passing strange to me that money raised from Missouri taxpayers should be used to support religious organizations to "transform lives and empower Missourians." That's what Republican Governor Matt Blunt is doing with his faith-based disaster relief initiative, designed "to increase cooperation between state government and faith and community-based groups in providing services to Missouri families…
revere | April 11, 2008I have professional colleagues who are dedicated birders but it has never interested me, and their interests are mainly independent of their lives as epidemiologists, toxicologists or whatever else they do at work. But the biosphere is truly interconnected in strange ways and sometimes what seems an unrelated realm intrudes itself front and center in a different context. Bird migration is a good example. How is bird flu spread? Is it human enabled movements of infected poultry or the rare bird trade? Or is it the "natural" movements of wild, migratory birds, the natural reservoir for the…
revere | April 10, 2008The news article is a month old but that doesn't make it any less infuriating. Potable water is becoming a major environmental issue, something that folks in the southeast of the US already know since they are experiencing a drought. What better time to sell the multinational food and beverage giant, the Nestle Company, the rights to draw hundreds of millions of gallons of water a year from wells drilled in a state park in Florida? To add insult to injury of the taxpayers of Florida, they Nestle will rebrand it as water associated with western Maryland.
I guess Florida needs the cash, and…
revere | April 10, 2008First Tamiflu (oseltamivir), now Relenza (zanamivir):
Health officials [in Canada] are investigating whether Relenza - a drug provinces have stockpiled in case of a pandemic flu outbreak - can be linked to fatal reactions or abnormal behaviour in children.
[snip]
The investigation is a response to recently updated safety warnings issued by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) or Relenza. In March, pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline updated Relenza's safety labels after children in Japan were reported to suffer from delirium, hallucinations. Some died after injuring themselves.
A…
revere | April 9, 2008The first time I can remember flying on a commercial airplane was in August of 1955. It was a DC3 or DC7 or something like that. Before that the family traveled by train or car. In the years following I always enjoyed air travel. I flew the Atlantic on a prop plane once (refueled in the Azores, I think), went to Europe on Icelandic Airways, then the cheapest way to get there, flew everywhere. Now I hate flying.
Air travel has become just another form of mass transit, and thanks to the TSA and the airlines themselves, a monumentally unpleasant and stressful one. At least on other kinds of mass…
revere | April 9, 2008If you pay attention to the latest news about bird flu I will not be telling you anything new that there is a detailed description in The Lancet (a British medical journal) of a case in China of probable person to person transmission of bird flu. You can get details from the incomparable reporting of Helen Branswell (Canadian Press), James Macintyre (The Independent), Deborah MacKenzie (New Scientist) or your favorite wire service. You don't need this blog for the facts, although we also try to provide you with some of those, too. What we try to do is always add some value. Usually it's just…
revere | April 8, 2008I'm writing this on an Apple Computer (a MacBook Pro). I've been using Apple products since 1981. I love (heart?) New York, too. Great city, full of energy. Few cities equal it in my opinion (Paris or Barcelona maybe). Now Apple Computer (the company) has filed a trademark challenge against GreeNYC, saying New York Mayor Bloomberg's environmental logo featuring a stylized apple looks too much like Apple's trademarked logo. In fact they look nothing like each other. You be the judge:
Source: MacObserver
GreeNYC is New York City's fledgling environmental effort. Apple Computer is a giant…
revere | April 8, 2008We can argue about the cause, but climate is changing. It may be called global warming but the effect most people will see is an increased variability of weather events, with more frequent extreme weather. Little things. Like Hurricane Katrina. WHO is among many warning that it is not only the physical effects that will affect people, but changes in disease patterns as well, with the brunt of climate change linked disease deaths coming from the Asia-Pacific region:
Shigeru Omi, WHO director for the Western Pacific region based in Manila, said "the impact of climate change will be felt more in…
revere | April 7, 2008What's the surest signs that animals of the human species have been somewhere? They always seem to leave their shit lying around. Literally:
Exploring Paisley Caves in the Cascade Range of Oregon, archaeologists have found a scattering of human coprolites, or fossil feces. The specimens preserved 14,000-year-old human protein and DNA, which the discoverers said was the strongest evidence yet of the earliest people living in North America.
Other archaeologists agreed that the findings established more firmly than before the presence of people on the continent at least 1,000 years before the…
revere | April 7, 2008To everything there is a season, including flu. We are now emerging from the other end of one of the more difficult flu seasons in recent years, although by no means out of the ordinary for the genre. Last time we commented, almost every state was experiencing widespread flu activity by the end of March only seven states reported widespread activity according to CDC:
States that were still reporting widespread flu the week of Mar 22 through 29 were Connecticut, Iowa, Maine, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Vermont. Regional flu activity was reported in 27 states and local activity…