revere | January 12, 2008Homeland Security Secretary Chertoff often seems mystified that the public doesn't want to be protected as much as he wants to protect them. Maybe a look at the record of the protectors will provide some clue. Protectors like the Transporation Security Administration (TSA), the lovable airport screeners that have done so much to make air travel a tiring and tiresome pain in the ass.
TSA makes mistakes. Quite often, it appears. Some of those mistakes can be pretty onerous. If your name gets on a no-fly list you are in for a heap of inconvenience -- or worse. But, as we were assured by TSA…
revere | January 11, 2008The Consumer Product Safety Commission is supposed to make sure toys and other consumer products are safe. They recalled 472 products last year. That's a pretty good record for a Lilliputian agency that has a staff of only 400. This is George Bush's dream -- shrinking the size of the government. CPSC started out life with 800 staff. If Bush's budget recommendations had been adopted by Congress it would have had to cut another 19 positions -- 5%. For once Congress didn't go along. They increased CPSC budget from $63 million to $80 million. The agency's head, former industry lawyer Nancy Nord,…
revere | January 11, 2008An AP report in The Daily Star (Egypt) says the head of the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) is complaining that fears of a flu pandemic caused by H5N1 are overblown. He's talking to the press so presumably he understands that he has to be careful how he says things. So we also have to assume that when Bernard Vallat said that he meant to send a message. But what is the message?
Vallat said the H5N1 virus has proved extremely stable, despite concerns that it could mutate into a form that could spread easily among humans.
"We have never seen such a stable strain," Vallat said.
He…
revere | January 10, 2008There is a determined honey lobby out there touting the health benefits of honey. That's fine with me, as I am not an enemy of honey. On the other hand, honey, while "natural," is not a completely harmless foodstuff, especially for infants. You wouldn't know it reading the spate of news articles on a Penn State study touting the benefits of honey over cough medicine for kids:
The study found that a small dose of buckwheat honey given before bedtime provided better relief of nighttime cough and sleep difficulty in children than no treatment or dextromethorphan (DM), a cough suppressant found…
revere | January 10, 2008Whenever confirmed human cases of bird flu appear in an area there usually follows heightened sensitivity to new cases of severe pneumonia. Are they bird flu too? Severe pneumonia is pretty common, so you can't automatically assume that "if it quacks like a duck and walks like a duck it must be a duck." It turns out there are a lot of birds that look like ducks that aren't ducks, at least when it comes to influenza-like illnesses. On the other hand, "testing negative" with PCR, which on its own is a pretty sensitive and specific test is also not foolproof. "On its own" means under the best…
revere | January 9, 2008Last Saturday night Mrs. R. and I voluntarily subjected ourselves to four hours of political debates, two involving aspirants for the presidential nomination of the Republican party and two hours for the Democrats. Bad karma? Anyway, for the record, the Democrats won both debates, their own and the Republican debate. In particular, listening to the know-nothing Republicans "debate" health care reforms amongst themselves was laughable since they unanimously agreed that black was white, in this case, that the US had the "best health care in the world." Virtually everybody knows this is false so…
revere | January 9, 2008Every year "flu season" comes during which there is a marked uptick in influenza-like illnesses (ILIs) in the community. An ILI is defined to be cough or sore throat together with a fever of over 100 degrees F. (37.8 degrees C.) or self-reported fever and chills as well as no other obvious cause (e.g., strep throat). But are all ILIs influenza? No. They are ILIs. In the absence of lab work (and since most are thought to be of viral origin, only non-specific symptomatic and supportive therapy is recommended and no diagnostic lab work is usually done), an ILI could be from influenza virus or…
revere | January 8, 2008Faith-based environmental protection. Why not? The Bush administration isn't using the law or regulations:
Ignoring all legal and technical evidence -- and the advice of his career experts -- [EPA Administrator Steven] Johnson sided with the car industry and rejected the request of California to enforce the state's landmark greenhouse gas standards for motor vehicles. (No fewer than 19 other states have already adopted these standards or are considering them, representing about half the U.S. population.) In fact, Johnson took action that his own legal team said was probably illegal.
[snip]
In…
revere | January 8, 2008A new study from a glycobiology laboratory at MIT is creating a buzz in the flu community (see the MIT Press Release here). A great deal of molecular biology and virology studies what happens when the virus gets into a cell to use the cell's own machinery to make copies of itself. Glycobiology is a relatively new area, concentrating on the straight and branched chains of sugar units that make up a great deal of the "stuff" one finds outside of a cell. What do these sugars have to do with influenza?
In earlier posts (see here and here and links therein) we showed how the influenza virus…
revere | January 7, 2008Lots of countries have or will mandate the use of low-energy light bulbs. That's it, for the incandescent bulb. Soon it will be just compact fluorescents or LEDs or whatever comes next. Along with this comes the inevitable news articles that start, "Health experts are warning that . . . ":
The Government's planned switchover from traditional light-bulbs to low-energy lighting could cause health problems for tens of thousands of people with skin conditions including eczema, experts have warned.
And there were warnings that consumers will have to take more care disposing of broken or expired…
revere | January 7, 2008Hospitals are dangerous places, but sometimes you have to be there. If you are a child in the developing world sick with pneumonia, the World Health Organization (WHO) thinks that's one of the times. Pneumonia is the big killer of children globally, so WHO guidelines call for children with severe pneumonia to be treated with intravenous antibiotics in the hospital. Now a landmark clinical trial from a team at the Boston University School of Public Health and published this week in The Lancet (January 4 issue), says these seriously ill children will do just as well at home on antibiotic syrup…
revere | January 6, 2008The big newswires and health agencies are relatively quiet, but word keeps leaking out of Egypt that there are a lot of suspect bird flu cases:
CAIRO: Hospitals nationwide reportedly quarantined more human cases suspected of being infected with the H5N1 bird flu virus.
According to Al-Masry Al-Youm newspaper, Damietta -- where the latest Bird Flu victim Hanem Atwa Ibrahim, 50, died late on Monday Dec. 31 in a Cairo hospital -- hosts the largest number of cases with five people suspected of carrying the virus, while the Upper Egyptian city of Qena came next, with two cases, followed by El-…
revere | January 6, 2008Jonathan Luxmoore of the Catholic News Service doesn't respect me, I guess. He thinks I'm a hypocrite because I said I liked Christmas although I'm an atheist. Well, Ex-CUSE . ME:
Sir,
I may not be alone in detecting a case of having your Christmas cake and eating it in David Aaronovitch's defence of carol-singing atheists (Comment, Dec 20) and accompanying letters. I find it hard to respect anyone who proclaims their atheism with missionary zeal, and then happily joins in singing such lines as "O Come let us adore Him, Christ the Lord", however agreeable they may find the experience.
If you…
revere | January 5, 2008If you are reading this you didn't die in 2005. But 2,447,903 Americans did die (if you aren't an American the good news is you aren't at risk of being included in the American death numbers). These are preliminary numbers, just released by CDC and the seven significant figures is a bit of -- what? -- overkill? Doesn't seem like the right word for this, but it is unlikely this is exactly the right number of deaths. Surely someone wasn't counted.
In any event, CDC tells us this corresponds to an "estimated age-adjusted death rate" of 798.8 deaths per 100,000 US standard population. The "age-…
revere | January 4, 2008Note to Senator Larry Craig. Now you can have "intimate contact with an anonymous stranger [in a public toilet] without the associated awkwardness of verbal discourse". No toe tapping required. Just look for the yellow color in the new thermochromic toilet seat (h/t Boingboing).
This beauty glows when it's warm, so that you can always sit on a toilet seat recently vacated by a stranger and get that nice warm feeling of "the other." Just look for the yellow (hot) Springfield Oval. And enjoy. Here's a pic:
revere | January 4, 2008With the turn of the calendar there is always both hope and anxiety about the year ahead. This is nice because it gives pundits and bloggers something to write about. Just before Christmas The Times of London published\ a "leading article" (unsigned), Black Swans and Bird Flu, which was about the anxiety part, assessing the threats, and planning for them in advance:
Living at risk, it has been said, is akin to jumping off the cliff and building your wings on the way down. Not everyone would be content with such a strategy. Some would not venture close to the edge, even if that meant missing a…
revere | January 3, 2008Too little discussed -- gender differences in upper respiratory infections:
glumbert - The Man Cold
revere | January 3, 2008Bora Zivkovic (aka Coturnix) is the Scienceblogs.com maestro at Blog Around the Clock. He is also a bona fide circadian rhythm researcher, which explains how he is able to blog so prolifically, orchestrate the community participation of PLoS One and still have time left over to compile the only anthology of scientific blogging, Open Laboratory, now in its second offering covering 2007. He's figured out how to go without sleep.
We didn't submit a post for consideration last year (our goof), but we did this time. I am glad to say we were one of the 50 posts selected (out of 486), so we are…
revere | January 3, 2008The back and forth about WHO over the weekend generated plenty of comment. I am still of the mind that WHO is an important part of the pandemic flu picture and we should try to help it do better. After defending them on Friday of last week I turned around and slammed them for poor risk communication on Sunday. A commenter observed that this may have been bad reporting, and while I allowed the possibility, I thought it too similar to past examples to accept this as the first explanation. However yesterday I received the following email from Mr. John Rainford, the WHO spokesman I took to task…
revere | January 2, 2008The 60s radical group, the Weathermen, took their name from a Bob Dylan song, Subterranean Homesick Blues: s' "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows." Now we have the converse. You don't need to break wind to know this weatherman blows. On his blog, Chris Allen, the TV weatherman from WBKO, Bowling Green, Kentucky, explains to us why he doesn't believe that humans are responsible for climate change. He is quick to say that just because he doesn't have a "Dr." in front of his name is no reason we shouldn't take his arguments seriously. We agree. This is why we shouldn't…