revere | November 21, 2007Blog is short for weblog, originally a chronological set of postings about, well, about whatever. Blogs are/were journals that were published publicly but also allowed readers to comment, read, react and in some ways affect the content. How much dialog and two way communication there was depended on the blog. Some have virtually none, although monitoring traffic and interest is one kind of reader feedback that doesn't depend on a formal comment facility. Others are highly interactive, with lots of comment, a community feeling and vigorous discussion. The big innovation, though, was that the…
revere | November 21, 2007The first day of the scheduled four day showdown in Geneva over sharing bird flu virus isolates is now over. What seems to have been accomplished is statements of opening positions. How moveable everyone is remains to be seen, as does whether there is an Alexander the Great around to cut the Gordian Knot (you can see the strands of the knot in some of our previous posts, for example (chronologically) here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here).
Here is Reuter's version of Day 1:
Indonesia, the nation worst hit by bird flu with 91 human deaths,…
revere | November 20, 2007It's OK for storm victims to live in them, but don't let your employees enter them: FEMA. Who else?
The Federal Emergency Management Agency is barring employees from entering thousands of stored travel trailers over concerns about hazardous fumes, while more than 48,000 other trailers continue to be used by hurricane victims in Louisiana and Mississippi.
FEMA is advising employees not to enter any of the roughly 70,000 trailers in storage areas across the country, but the directive does not apply to other trailers still in use, agency spokeswoman Mary Margaret Walker said Thursday. (AP; hat…
revere | November 20, 2007If a rogue H5N1 virus easiy tansmissible between people is to develop, the most plausible spot for it to happen is Indonesia, the world's fourth most populous with a vast reservoir of infected poultry (and who knows what else) and more human cases (113) and more deaths (91) than any other country. But Indonesia still refuses to share its human H5N1 isolates, contending they get nothing tangible from an arrangement which is likely to lead to vaccines they won't be able to afford. Under the current system, which allows intellectual property rights to cover vaccines developed from WHO supplied…
revere | November 19, 2007Air pollution exists in two physical forms: as a gas (molecules) and as particles (usually heterogeneous agglomerations of huge numbers of molecules stuck together). Particles in the air are also called aerosols. Depending upon their size (really their aerodynamic behavior), their abundance and their composition, they can affect our lungs, vegetation or visibility. They can come from anywhere. Sometimes they are formed "in place" by secondary chemical reactions of precursor pollutants. Photochemical oxidant pollution ("smog") is of this type. Sometimes it is of natural origin and can be…
revere | November 19, 2007You become infected with West Nile Virus (WNV) when a mosquito vector bites you. As the mosquito sucks your blood (the protein meal makes it possible for her to ovulate), she replaces some of it with her saliva. The virus is in the saliva and if it finds a suitable cell to infect, we're off to the races.
If you are bitten by an uninfected mosquito you obviously can't get infected. But a new set of experiments in mice shows that having been previously bitten by the same species of mosquito markedly increases the chance and severity of infection with WNV in subsequent bites:.
In their…
revere | November 18, 2007If I am going to defend a public health heretic, I'd better get my disclaimers out on the table at the outset. The tobacco habit is among the world's top public health threats and the purveyors of the deadly products that cause it have a lot to answer for. They belong in jail. As a public health scientist, I've never taken a penny from Big Tobacco and never will. But as a scientist I cannot fight them with half truths or lies any more than I can fight torture by torturing someone.
Religion distorts science and I'm not an adherent of any religion, including cults within academic public health…
revere | November 18, 2007The religious are all a-twitter these days about "the New Atheism," usually referring to polemics by the likes of Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens et al. I doubt most atheists have read these books (why should they?) and while I'd like to think they have converted many of the faithful, I rather doubt that, too. They are not a cause but a sign of the times. The two most powerful forces stimulating the new and higher public status of non-belief are 9-11 and Creationism, both for the same reasons: they are graphic illustrations of the evils of religious fanaticism and delusion. Once a person starts to…
revere | November 17, 2007I used to watch The Daily Show every night (thanks to TiVo). Now I don't because of the writers' strike. So I have to settle for this. Enjoy:
revere | November 17, 2007I wasn't at the Women's Health Fair and Symposium at Onandoga Community College in New York so I didn't hear all of what CDC Director Julie Gerberding said there. I just know what was reported in the Syracuse Post Standard. But I wasn't impressed:
"If I gave each of you $5,000 and said this is the money you can spend on health for yourself or for your children or family, how would you spend that money? she asked. "For a long time, many of us have been protected from thinking about the value of our health investments because our insurance took care of everything. Well, today more people don't…
revere | November 16, 2007The blogosphere is pretty crowded these days and one might think there's no need for less, not more. But in public health, that's not the case. There are a lot of Doctor/Medical blogs but not many public health blogs. So yesterday marked a significant milestone in the public health blogosphere, the First Blogiversary of The Pump Handle. As Jordan Barab, lately of Confined Space fame, notes in a congratulatory comment over at TPH, first year blog mortality is extremely high, so just making it at all is a significant accomplishment.
But TPH didn't "just make it" but made it in real style. They…
revere | November 16, 2007It's been a while since we discussed the Avastin-Lucentis controversy, but the battle has been taken up by another blogger, Howard Brody at Hooked:
Quick overview--Genentech, the biotech firm, is maker of a very successful drug (brand name: Avastin) that is quite useful in colon cancer. The drug works by counteracting the tendency of tumors to create a lot of new, small blood vessels to keep the growing tumor supplied with blood. Some smart person figured out that the eye disease called wet macular degeneration is caused by a similar proliferation of new blood vessels and so the same sort of…
revere | November 15, 2007SciBling Bora (aka coturnix) at Blog Around the Clock has scored a major coup for Open Access publishing today. Fittingly the subject matter is a dinosaur, an apt symbol for the new nail in the coffin of traditional scientific publishing that the paper represents. Bora is the Online Community Manager at PLoS-ONE (Public Library of Science), one of the leading Open Access science publishers. PLoS ONE is unusual even among OA publications in that it concentrates on rapid publication after a baseline technical review by Editorial Board members. It covers all areas of science and medicine and…
revere | November 15, 2007If you are in the "older age group" (as those of us in that group prefer to be called) you are at increased risk of dying from seasonal influenza (pandemic strains seem to target the young), but you are also less likely to be helped by a flu shot because you don't mount as fast and effective an immune response. At least that's what we think on the basis of current evidence. Like everything else about flu, it's subject to change.
Like the idea that you have a 48 hour window for the use of antiviral neuraminidase inhibitors like tamiflu. After 48 hours, we believed, they don't do any good.…
revere | November 14, 2007Our SciBlings at The Intersection, Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum, remind us that pandemics aren't the only natural disaster. I'm kidding, of course. You knew there were others, right? Like Cyclone Sidr, practically on top of the people of Bangladesh. First story on CNN, right? I'm kidding of course. They have to wait for the bodies to wash up first. Anyway, Chris says the latest from the Joint Typhoon Warning Center (JTWC) has this hurricane bearing down on that poor country at almost Cat 5 levels and it may still be intensifying. Chris is the author of the excellent book, Storm…
revere | November 14, 2007The academic world has lots of dark nooks and crannies not usually seen by the general public. One of them is the order in which authors are listed on a publication. If you have six people from two or three laboratories collaborating on an important paper, who will be the "senior author." And what does senior author mean? And how do you find the senior author on the list of names attached to the paper? It turns out that different disciplines have different conventions:
Authorship practice varies by field, making interdisciplinary collaborations and the subsequent author lists more complicated…
revere | November 14, 2007The UK has a bird flu outbreak in turkeys. With any luck the government will do a better job of it than they did last time, although they are slashing funds for control of the problem, which doesn't make much sense. But at least we know about it and how serious it is or it isn't. We don't have to guess or wonder or suspect. Not true for China, also experiencing an outbreak in the southern city of Guangzhou. As usual, China is controlling the news. They are also probably suppressing it:
The outbreak in Guangzhou's Panyu district is the first of the H5N1 bird flu strain since May, but it has…
revere | November 13, 2007Being private isn't the same as being anonymous according to the Bush administration. So what does privacy mean, according to Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence?
Instead, it should mean that government and businesses properly safeguard people's private communications and financial information.
[snip]
"Our job now is to engage in a productive debate, which focuses on privacy as a component of appropriate levels of security and public safety," Kerr said. "I think all of us have to really take stock of what we already are willing to give up, in terms of…
revere | November 13, 2007WalMart isn't my favorite store but they have shown one effective way to increase awareness about preparing for a pandemic or any other catastrophe that would interrupt supply chains and routine services. The store had a "free flu prep kit" lottery where entry involved filling out a survey about how much they knew about fllu preparing for flu. The winner was among 350 entries and she is frank to admit she didn't now anything about pandemic flu. That's changed:
Heather Farris says she didn't know much about a pandemic flu before, but now with enough flu supplies to stock a small van, she plans…
revere | November 12, 2007Here's a thought for "Veterans" Day: one out of nine people in the US is a veteran but one out of four homeless persons is a veteran. That's something for Americans to be proud of for sure. Support Our Troops is either just a slogan or they stop being worthy of support when they stop being cannon fodder:
And homelessness is not just a problem among middle-age and elderly veterans. Younger veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan are trickling into shelters and soup kitchens seeking services, treatment or help with finding a job.
The Veterans Affairs Department has identified 1,500 homeless veterans…