revere | March 5, 2008Every once in a while we run across introductory presentations of basic bird flu-ology we think are particularly good. This is one. If you follow this area you won't learn anything new, but I think you'll be impressed by how concise and well chosen this material is. I have a few quibbles with the material but on the whole it is accurate and informative. If you are new to the subject of flu science, this is a very quick and efficient starter kit. You can find more detailed explanations in a number of our posts (here, here, here, here, here):
revere | March 4, 2008Americans work harder than Europeans -- often two or three jobs -- and even the well paid don't get much vacation. Most of us don't have vacation houses, either. But we aren't Republican Presidents. Ronald Reagan was one of the most famous vacationing presidents, spending a whopping 335 days of his presidency at his ranch in Santa Barbara. That's almost a full year of eight not out of the White House.
Compared to George W. Bush, though, Ronald Reagan was a workaholic. Bush just made his 70th visit to his ranch at Crawford, Texas, and has racked up 452 days. That's than 25% more than Reagan…
revere | March 4, 2008Press releases are the way a lot of scientific information is released today. Straight to the public, no peer review. This has advantages and disadvantages. The advantages are speed and directness. No filtering through reviewers, journal editors, colleagues. And of course that's the disadvantage, too, especially when the news comes from an interested party as it usually does in a press release. This is part of the interpretation of data these days. All that being said, the maker of Tamiflu, Hoffman - La Roche, has released data they have gathered from physicians treating cases of H5N1 in…
revere | March 3, 2008Scienceblogs has a German cousin, Scienceblogs.de where I found this absolutely hilarious YouTube music video, "Scientists for a better PCR." Yes, it's an advert for a PCR device called a thermocycler but it's incredibly funny -- if you have that kind of sense of humor.
PCR is a technique called polymerase chain reaction. It can take pre-specified tiny bits of DNA or RNA and grow them up into huge amounts. That's how they can do forensic DNA identification from the small amounts in spit or semen stains. They pre-specify parts of DNA that are unique to an individual and amplify it up by PCR.…
revere | March 3, 2008Highly pathogenic variant of avian influenza A of the subtype H5N1 is here to stay, at least in the world's poultry population. While it's around it continues to cause sporadic but deadly human infections, some 369 of them of whom 234 have died (official WHO figures as of 28 February 2008). So this virus can infect humans and make them seriously or fatally ill. There is truly massive exposure because people live in close contact with infected domestic poultry in many countries. And the human population has not seen this subtype of virus before so there is little natural immunity. All that's…
revere | March 2, 2008The Indonesian virus sharing impasse is said to be over, and with the dénouement comes some fascinating new information. Many will remember the row started when an Australian vaccine maker took an Indonesian viral isolate and made an experimental vaccine from it (see many posts among those here). At the time it was said the Indonesian Health Minister objected that her country would never be able to afford the vaccine and she therefore stopped making the virus available to WHO. WHO was the source of the seed strain used by the Australian company to make a prototype vaccine.
It turns out,…
revere | March 2, 2008Tuesday, March 4, is another big voting day in four US states. It may decide who will be the Democratic Presidential nominee. There have been two debates recently between the contenders, Senator Clinton and Senator Obama. While many issues were discussed, religion was not. How can we make up our minds if we don't know where these candidates stand on the most crucial issues facing us in the 21st century. So here's a quick recap. If you bring you charged laptop into the voting booth you can just boot it up, surf over to the blog and use this information to cast you ballot. Note that since this…
revere | March 1, 2008Full disclosure: I know the toxicologist who is the subject of this post. Not well. But I know her and I know her work and she is, as the story from the LA Times says, a highly respected scientist. And no shrinking violet, which accounts for the fact that the Bush EPA has dismissed her from an expert panel on brominated flame retardants widely used in consumer products like upholstery and electronic equipment. Your body is also full of them. Well, at least that's true for some 90% of Americans. Maybe you are the one in ten. Back to the one in 300,000,000, the President of this country (for…
revere | February 29, 2008Flying like a bat out of hell is supposed to mean sudden, fast and wild.But how do bats fly? It turns out they have some unique tricks:
Bats have a clever aerodynamic trick to make flying easier, researchers have found: the sharp edge at the front of their wings cuts through the air in such a way as to create a vortex on top of the wing, producing up to 40% of the lift needed to stay aloft.
"It explains how these animals are able to fly at very slow speed," says Anders Hedenström from Lund University in Sweden, who led the research -- published in Science 1 -- that showed the effect with a…
revere | February 29, 2008All I can say is that it's a good thing Canadian Press's Helen Branswell isn't a blogger or she'd put all the rest of us flu bloggers out of business. She is the professional flu reporter's professional (one of the best of the flu reporters once described a story of hers to me as "annoyingly good"). Being in Canada she also has more of an international perspective, as in a recent story about differences between seasonal flu in the US and Canada this year, a story that would have escaped the notice of US based reporters (hat tip to crof):
Maps generated by the Public Health Agency of Canada…
revere | February 28, 2008There are so many hot button issues today it's not possible to pick "the" biggest one. But certainly in the top five (unfrtunately there are 100 things in the top 5) must be "net neutrality." Essentially it is whether commercial internet service providers (like Comcast or RCN) should be allowed to give preference to certain kinds of traffic over others, in effect controlling which websites we can see and which ones we can't. Net neutrality, which is in theory what we have now, would make it mandatory that service providers be neutral in how they treat traffic. Data packets are data packets,…
revere | February 28, 2008When WHO tells us that there is no bigger bird flu problem in China I guess it's all relative. Like the old joke where one old man asks the other how he feels, the answer is "compared to what"?
The World Health Organization says that while there have already been three deaths from bird flu in China this year, there are no signs the deadly disease is becoming a bigger problem.
In a statement Wednesday, the WHO's top representative in China, Hans Troedsson, says the three recent cases were not unexpected considering the winter season. (VOA News)
Despite the occurrence of three deaths in China…
revere | February 27, 2008I'm away from home and I did something really, really bad to my back. I could hardly tie my boots this morning (boots needed; it is snowing like stink up here). One of my fellow scientists took one look at me and said, "I guess you need some Vioxx." Then he laughed. Since I hardly know this person I don't think he was trying to kill me -- he wouldn't have laughed, then, I'm guessing. But Vioxx has killed some other people before the FDA finally acknowledged it could do that. They were soundly (and appropriately) criticized for keeping too quiet. Now, it seems, some are complaining because…
revere | February 27, 2008Chromium is OK when it's on your car bumper but not so OK when it's in your workplace air or your drinking water. That's because chromium, in some of its forms, causes cancer. In fact it is a remarkably good carcinogen. A few years, ago both epidemiological studies and risk estimates done by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) suggested the lifetime risk of dying of lung cancer for workers exposed at the then workplace limits as about 25%. This is higher than for heavy cigarette smokers. The US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) lowered the workplace standard by a…
revere | February 26, 2008Since I'm up in Canada doing some science (presenting a paper at a meeting) I thought I'd give a little plug for one of my favorite sites, Daily Dose of Imagery. If you like photography, this guy from Toronto is worth taking a look at. There's a new pic every day (hence the name) and you can page back to previous ones with the "day before" button at the bottom . What impresses me most about his photos is the incredible composition. Take a look at them and notice how well composed they are. This takes real skill.
The site is here. Enjoy.
revere | February 26, 2008As I write this I am at 30,000 feet winging my way to Montreal, Canada, where the temperature is below freezing. So what more appropriate topic than microbial hazards of bathing beaches? Maybe it was my foray into the wonderful world of fecal accidents that prompted me to look further into the subject but I found a couple of papers from last year by a groups at Johns Hopkins about the effect of bather density on levels of parasites pathogenic for humans at one particular beach in Maryland, the Hammerman area of Gunpowder Falls State Park in Chase, Maryland in mid to late summer of 2006 (here…
revere | February 25, 2008I hate writing posts like this almost as much as people hate reading them. But write them I must. It's the cell phone issue again.
Health risks from cell phones aren't supposed to happen because the radiofrequency electromagnetic radiation involved is not energetic enough to ionize molecules. The damage done by ionizing radiation is related to the chemical changes that ensue from the ionizations. Those chemical changes don't occur with exposure to non-ionizing radiation. The most non-ionizing radiation is supposed to do is heat of up the tissue (as in a microwave oven), and the thermal…
revere | February 25, 2008The simultaneous news of widespread flu and the mismatch of two components of this year's seasonal vaccine (see here and here) seem to have synergized. That's not so good in the view of many flu experts, who believe (correctly) that it leads to a misunderstanding of how the vaccine works (or doesn't):
Flu experts and public health officials don't like it when the strains in the flu vaccine aren't an optimal match to the circulating viruses. They know elevated rates of sickness and influenza-related deaths may result.
But they dislike the headlines almost as much, fearing the black-and-white…
revere | February 24, 2008Stories about insurance companies denying coverage are all too common (what kind of world is this, anyway?). But yesterday's story that a big insurer would have to pay for it is a surprise (what kind of world is this, anyway, that this is a surprise?):
One of California's largest for-profit insurers stopped a controversial practice of canceling sick policyholders Friday after a judge ordered Health Net Inc. to pay more than $9 million to a breast cancer patient it dropped in the middle of chemotherapy.
The ruling by a private arbitration judge was the first of its kind and the most powerful…
revere | February 24, 2008This is the Final Word, I guess:
TEHRAN, Iran - Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said Sunday that God would punish Iranians if they do not support the country's disputed nuclear program, state radio reported.
"The Iranian people openly announce that they will defend their rights... God will reprimand them if they do not do so," state radio quoted Khamenei as saying. (AP via Yahoo News)
Or is this the Final Word?