revere | February 2, 2008Last week we brought you the Kinoki Footpad and the TV ad that drives me crazy. Not all infomercials are so stupid. Some sell products with genuine health benefits. I spend a lot of time sitting in front of a computer (like at this moment) so I don't get enough exercise. And my abs? Forget it (bad visual).
But as Mike Huckabee (or was it Bill Clinton) might say, Hope is a Chair called Hawaii:
revere | February 2, 2008There's a world out there I hardly know, although apparently I am part of it. The sandwich world:
High saturation in the US sandwich market will force manufacturers to focus on niche age and ethnic markets in order to boost market share, predicts a new Mintel report.
According to estimations made by Mintel at the end of 2007, the US sandwich industry is now worth more than $121bn - a massive market for product historically created to use up old meat and stale bread.
However, Mintel predicts that the market will experience slow growth of 13 per cent over the 2007 to 2009 period - only half of…
revere | February 1, 2008I'm an environmental epidemiologist with a special interest in surveillance. So it would be nice to say that epidemiological investigations and surveillance systems were responsible for discovering most of the workplace diseases we see nowadays. But the simple truth seems to be that most environmental and occupational diseases are still discovered the old fashioned way: by astute clinicians, workers or family members. Such was the case for the recent cluster of cases of a progressive neurologic syndrome among slaughterhouse workers we posted on a while back. The Minnesota Department of Health…
revere | February 1, 2008The AP's Margie Mason is a pretty good flu reporter and she has a story on the wires today whose title encapsulates the bird flu history of the last four years: Bird flu continues march 4 years later. The number of human deaths is still not large -- a few hundred -- just a day at the office in Iraq. But the virus just keeps extending its geographic range in poultry stocks and wherever it does it there is a risk of human infections. Fourteen countries so far have officially confirmed influenza A/H5N1 cases. The number of birds killed by infection or slaughtered to prevent the spread of…
revere | January 31, 2008There is a class of legal cases that are so blatant lawyers call them Oh My God cases, you know, the kind when you see the facts you say, "Oh my God" (NB: don't give me grief because I'm an atheist. I'm allowed to use colloquial phrases that have their origins in myth and superstition).
Back to the subject. I'm a journal editor and also a frequent peer reviewer of scientific articles for other journals (I'm procrastinating reviewing three of them by writing this post). And in that context, I'd call this story an Oh my God story:
A peer reviewer leaked a paper due to appear in The New England…
revere | January 31, 2008The number of deaths in Indonesia from bird flu just shot past the 100 mark without even pausing -- 101 was recorded right afterward. Tibet announced an outbreak and the disease continued to march through the Indian subcontinent, although the UN flu czar, Dr. David Nabarro said he thought the Indian/West Bengal outbreak was "coming under control." The use of the progressive tense here ("coming under control") suggests this is a mix of hope and belief and in any case indicates the outbreak is still not under control. Which won't come as a surprise to the residents of Kolkata (neé Calcutta):…
revere | January 30, 2008Americans are very generous. Consider they have just given away access to 3 million acres (5000 square miles) of wilderness to logging, mining and road building companies to use as they see fit. Very generous indeed:
The Bush administration plan for the [Tongass] forest, the largest in the US at nearly 17m acres, would open 3.4m acres to logging, road building and other development, including about 2.4m acres that are currently remote and without roads. About 663,000 acres are in areas considered most valuable for timber production.
The move, the latest in a long-running saga over the Tongass…
revere | January 30, 2008OK, they're not cities, they are states. Or cities in states. Whatever. But when it comes to flu shots they are quite different. First benighted Mississippi:
The Mississippi State Department of Health (MSDH) reports 27 laboratory-confirmed influenza cases in counties throughout Mississippi. The presence of influenza was documented by the MSDH Laboratory in the past few weeks.
"We are now in the peak season of influenza, which will last for the next couple of months," said State Health Officer Dr. Ed Thompson. "If you haven't gotten your flu shot, it's time to get it now. It's still not too…
revere | January 29, 2008This isn't a contest, exactly, but more a question to the huddled masses. Mrs. R., who is Italian, was asking me the other day what the Yiddish word Mitvah meant. It turns out it isn't a Yiddish word (it's Hebrew) and while it has some kind of religious meaning about fulfilling commandments, I'm not into religious meanings so I told her the colloquial meaning: doing a good deed or a kindness, or an act of kindness. Maybe it has a one word English equivalent, but it's still a pretty good single word for an idea that usually takes more words in English. So we started talking about other words…
revere | January 29, 2008Since the antiviral agent oseltamivir (Tamiflu) has been touted as the global savior should a bird flu pandemic materialize the idea has been haunted by the specter of Tamiflu resistance. What if H5N1 becomes resistant to the drug? Is all lost? Now it is being reported in the media that the European Centre for Disease Control and Prevention has found that the predominant circulating seasonal flu virus in Europe this year, H1N1, is showing an unexpectedly high rate of Tamiflu resistance (19/148 isolates tested). This is much more than what has been seen in the past and was from patients not…
revere | January 28, 2008Geoerge Bush doesn't want government involved in climate change. Best done by voluntary measures, he says. Volunteers anyone? Guess not:
Global warming ranks far down the concerns of the world's biggest companies, despite world leaders' hopes that they will pioneer solutions to the impending climate crisis, a startling survey will reveal this week.
Nearly nine in 10 of them do not rate it as a priority, says the study, which canvassed more than 500 big businesses in Britain, the US, Germany, Japan, India and China. Nearly twice as many see climate change as imposing costs on their business as…
revere | January 28, 2008Everyone knows it's flu season. We see the evidence in birds and people with H5N1. The Indian subcontinent is awash in birds with H5N1. Sometimes here we forget to remind people it is also flu season with the regular circulating subtypes, H1 and H3 and this is shaping up to be a predominantly H1 season in Europe and the US.
In the US:
During week 3 (January 13 - 19, 2008), influenza activity continued to increase in the United States.
Three hundred twenty-nine (11.1%) specimens tested by U.S. World Health Organization (WHO) and National Respiratory and Enteric Virus Surveillance System (…
revere | January 27, 2008There's no vaccine for the influenza subtype, H5N1, of most concern as the agent of the next pandemic but evidence exists that there is some cross-reactivity with existing seasonal vaccines (it's not clear how much if any, but it might not take much) or that previous vaccination with seasonal vaccine produces a much quicker response to an H5N1 vaccine. Moreover there remains a substantial toll in morbidity and mortality from the seasonal influenza which the current vaccines are designed for. So strategies to encourage key populations to get the existing flu vaccine are of interest to public…
revere | January 27, 2008Rudolph "9/11" Giuliani is banking on the good Republicans in Florida to save his sorry ass in the primary. Given the gang of bottom feeders running in that Party's primary, you wonder how anyone could be stupid enough to vote in it, but there is ample evidence that they exist a-plenty in Florida. I don't mean to pick on Florida. People with barely two neurons to rub together seem to be everywhere. They even have their own TV network, Fox. That way when MyFoxOrlando gestates a particularly redolent fecal load, they can relieve themselves through still other orifices -- MyFoxColorado, for…
revere | January 26, 2008When you open a package delivered to your hotel room in the middle of the night and look inside to find the inside looking back at you it's probably time to go back to bed. After putting the contents in the fridge, of course:
A hotel guest in the Tasmanian city of Hobart was shocked when he received a foam box on Tuesday night containing a single human eyeball.
The box marked "Live human organs for transplant" was delivered by mistake by an unwitting taxi driver.
Hotel worker Gabriel Winner - who requested the name of the hotel not be used - says the agitated guest brought the esky [an…
revere | January 25, 2008The particles are smaller but the risks appear to be bigger. We're talking air pollution, here, folks. Not so long ago EPA regulations were on the basis of pretty large partiles, ten microns in size. Then a considerable body of work indicated that much smaller particulate matter, size around 2.5 microns were a much better measure of risk. Like a lot of things, though, as our measurements get better we are finding effects, sometimes big ones, with ever smaller particles. A recent study published in Circulation Research and reported by Bloomberg says that unregulated extremely fine particles,…
revere | January 25, 2008You'd think finding that there were some bird flu infections that went undetected would be bad news but it is actually good news. Not tremendous good news but better than no news, and that's unusual in the bird flu world. For some time the absence of mild or inapparent infections has been worrying. It means that the current case fatality ratio of over 60% is the real CFR, not one based on just the most serious cases coming to the attention of the surveillance system. Now scientists gathered in Bangkok at one of the many gatherings of those studying the disease have heard some new data…
revere | January 24, 2008Unlike Orac at Respectful Insolence, I'm not particularly obsessed with what he calls "woo": medical quackery and fraud. He has every reason to go bullshit over it, since it is potentially very dangerous stuff. But I have a limited supply of outrage and quackery just doesn't set me off. Usually. So I am surprised at how bullshit I get every time I see this piece of shit advert for something called the Kinoki footpad detoxification system. I want to scream when it comes on television. I mean really SCREAM. Mrs. R. has to restrain me from yelling at the TV. This ad pushes all my buttons. It…
revere | January 24, 2008Predictable as clockwork, no sooner does the Director General of the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE), M. Bernard Vallat tell us that things are looking up for bird flu then we have a massive outbreak threatening to devastate the poultry industry of India. So the poultry problem is neither stable nor under control, whatever M. Vallat says (and I daresay he probably regrets saying it). The Indian problem is a big deal, with reports of villagers eating birds that died of the virus and violent resistance to culling efforts. Clearly India was unprepared for this poultry outbreak,…
revere | January 23, 2008This week sees the tenth anniversary of an important event in the American environmental movement, although few people know it (even some who were there had forgotten the date). In late January, 1998, a group of 32 environmental scientists, activists and scholars sat down together at the Wingspread Conference Center in Racine, Wisconsin to hash out a consensus statement on The Precautionary Principle. After a grueling three days, the statement was put into final form on January 25 (just in time to see my beloved Green Bay Packers lose the Superbowl. Is history repeating itself? Aargh!).
In…