revere | November 12, 2007A year ago we posted this on November 11. We can't think of another way to say the same thing, so we'll just say it again the same way we did last year.
Alas:
Today is called Veterans Day in the United States, but everywhere else it is Remembrance Day. When we were young it celebrated the end of shooting and was still Armistice Day. Now it celebrates the melancholy fact that young people have again picked up guns, not that they were at last able to put them down on the Eleventh Hour of the Eleventh Day of the Eleventh Month in 1918.
The change came during the Cold War. In 1954 we forgot…
revere | November 11, 2007Time to return to a theme we have sounded on numerous occasions in the past three years. In a recent post we called for a renewed investment in our public health and social service infrastructure as the best strategy. The object is to harden local communities and make them more resilient to all kinds of shocks, not just a pandemic. We should have added, however, that this means local preparation can't be too local: only looking after ourselves and our families. Of course families should prepare, to the best of their ability, and having some reasonable stockpile will stand them in good stead…
revere | November 11, 2007With the Kentucky general election a day away, the administration of Governor Ernie Fletcher wasted not time getting the Ten Commandments posted on state property in the wake of a judge's ruling allowing it as part of a display of donated "historical documents" that included the Magna Carta and the Kentucky Constitution. To the Governor the ruling must have truly seemed Heaven Sent. He was in a hard fought battle for re-election and in his State of the Commonwealth address in 2006, Fletcher contended that:
. . . under Kentucky law, teachers already have the freedom to teach "intelligent…
revere | November 10, 2007CDC has just released current smoking prevalence data showing that about 21% of Americans smoke daily or some days on a regular basis. This number has not changed in three years, so we seem to have plateaued. Since everyone knows what a deadly habit smoking is, this is disturbing. The operative word, of course, is "habit," although addiction would seem to be a better choice. We persist in using the word "voluntary" to describe smoking, but CDC data also show that almost half of all smokers quit for a day or more -- unsuccessfully. Since I'm a native English speaker I think I know what the…
revere | November 9, 2007I'm seeing all sorts of ways to refer to Members of Congress (meaning mostly Representatives, although Senators are also Members of Congress). Congressman and Congresswoman are not gender neutral and are disappearing from the language. Congressperson? Ugh. Liberal blogs will often use "Congresscritters" to register disdain, but I never liked it much. I just saw Congressfolk as an alternative. Pathetic. So here's another suggestion.
In the 1960s and 70s there was a particularly noxious Boston pol by the name of Louise Day Hicks. Hicks made her stand on opposing the desegregation of the Boston…
revere | November 9, 2007Influenza A/H5N1 (bird flu) bubbles away this year much as in past years and public health professionals continue to wait with bated breath for the other shoe to drop. It could happen this year, next year or not at all. That's the way the world is. Betting on "not at all" isn't considered prudent by most people in public health, despite the fact that it's possible. So given the uncertainty, what is the best strategy?
It is a bit disconcerting to see that the overwhelming preponderance of resources to pandemic preparedness resources are going into influenza-specific counter-measures,…
revere | November 8, 2007Suppose US agribusiness food animals were being fed a poison that killed a few tens of thousands of Americans a year. Would we want them to stop? Maybe we weren't sure but had more than ample grounds for suspicion. Would we want scientists and the government to be looking into it and maybe even halting it until we had a clear answer? I would hope so. But that seems to be the situation with antibiotics and factory farming. Yesterday we posted about the discovery by Dutch scientists that methicillin resistant Stophylococcus aureus (MRSA) had a home and probably an origin in pigs and cattle in…
revere | November 8, 2007Via the Clinician's Biosecurity Network Report we learn of a new study from the Webster St. Jude laboratory in Memphis showing that H5N1 can mutate to oseltamivir (Tamiflu) resistance without any loss in genetic fitness. Tamiflu resistance has been seen but infrequent and there was considerable evidence that the resistant strains were handicapped in some way, thus making them either less virulent or less transmissible. The hope was this was a built-in limitation. Now we know it isn't:
To investigate the fitness (pathogenicity and replication efficiency) of NAI-resistant [neuraminidase…
revere | November 7, 2007I know there are readers here who will say this is the "price of freedom" or some such nonsense. But give me a break. The father-in-law of a Swede didn't want him to travel, so he dropped a dime on him to the FBI, saying he had links to al Qaeda:
When the husband refused to stay home, his father-in-law wrote an email to the FBI saying the son-in-law had links to al-Qaeda in Sweden and that he was travelling to the US to meet his contacts.
He provided information on the flight number and date of arrival in the US.
The son-in-law was arrested upon landing in Florida. He was placed in handcuffs…
revere | November 7, 2007A pig and a hen are strolling along and they see a sign in a luncheonette window: Ham and Eggs, 99 cents. The hen says, wistfully, "Isn't it great the contribution we are making to the community?" The pig replies, "For you it's a contribution. For me it's total commitment." Now the pig may be having his revenge.
The drug-resistant bug, methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus or MRSA, is making headlines now that it has emerged from its old role as a hospital acquired infection to its new, more ominous one as a nasty infectious agent loose in the community, where it can infect infecting…
revere | November 6, 2007We dwell a lot on the many unknowns about the bird flu H5N1 virus. What could make it easily transmissible between people? What determines what host it infects? What makes it so virulent? With the threat of a pandemic looming it can sometimes seem the virus is an especially, maybe even uniquely, wily foe. Every move we make it changes to outsmart us. We remain helpless. But the same is true of so many other deadly threats, including one that killed over 160,000 people in the US last year: lung cancer. What makes lung cancer so deadly? Why are some lung cancers so aggressive? What makes it…
revere | November 6, 2007When the emergency room gets a huge influx of cases in a disaster it's time for triage, the separation of the those most likely to need and benefit from immediate emergency care from those that can wait or can't be helped. In a mass casualty disaster the assumption is that triage should start outside the doors of the ER, sending only the sickest there. Makes sense. But is it true? A computer simulation done by Cornell Medical School suggests it might not be:
. . . researchers at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center have created a computer simulation model of trauma…
revere | November 5, 2007If all mice look alike to you, it's probably because you're not a mouse (if you are, I'm surprised you are reading this blog). But how do mice recognize each other? It appears the lady tells the gent to piss off:
Scientists at the University of Liverpool have discovered that mice rely on a special set of proteins to recognise each other.
Previous study assumed that another set of genes that influence smell in vertebrates might be used by animals that identify each other through scent. The team found, however, that mice use a highly specialised set of proteins in their urine to recognise…
revere | November 5, 2007I don't like to be a curmudgeon and I'm pretty tolerant when students write research papers that don't quite make professional grade. Writing papers may look easy -- you just have to report your results, right? -- but it isn't. Nor is designing a study or collecting the data. It takes time and practice to learn this and you make a lot of mistakes. I know from personal experience. It's the job of mentors, advisors and journal editors to educate students, bring them along, show them how to do it.
Apparently none of these guardians of the literature were awake when the paper, "Medical students…
revere | November 4, 2007Australia has a National Health System and, according to some of its doctors, it is crumbling. Aha, say the foes of American Universal Health Care, "I told you so." And I'll have to admit, they did. Fair is fair. So where is Australia's health system heading?
Australia's public health system is crumbling, leading the country toward a US-style privatised health model, doctors say.
Doctors Reform Society national president Con Costa wants federal Health Minister Tony Abbott to say whether he believes it is better to privatise the health system. (Sydney Morning Herald)
John Howard, the George…
revere | November 4, 2007So many movies. So little time. What I needed was a guide to tell me what I can safely watch without putting my immortal soul in danger. And I've found just the thing: Movieguide: A Biblical Guide to Movies, Entertainment and Culture for Families. But to my horror, I've already seen some of the movies that could damn me to eternal suffering:
Ever since the critical and box office success of movies like Michael Moore's "Bowling for Columbine" and "Fahrenheit 9/11," the atheist, left-wing elitists in the mass media have stepped up their attacks on the patriotic, traditional and orthodox values…
revere | November 3, 2007I've been to plenty of scientific meetings sponsored by federal agencies in the last several years where we have either had to do weird back door stuff just to have coffee breaks as part of the program or if we are sponsoring it and inviting federal scientists and staff they have to go off and have lunch on their own nickel so they won't run afoul of conflict of interest regs. They would be taking a "gift" from us if they ate food we paid for. OK. I get the principle. Some of it is bureaucratic and dumb but where do you draw the line? Now I find out where the big guys draw the line:
The chief…
revere | November 2, 2007Medical education in the US is four grueling years on top of four years of undergraduate college education. The spectrum of topics is hugely wide and the depth of coverage hugely uneven. Some things are covered in ridiculous detail and others with breathtaking superficiality. And some things hardly at all:
Medical students are woefully uninformed about military medical ethics and a physician's responsibilities under the Geneva Conventions, a situation that could be a problem if they're ever drafted, according to an article by Harvard Medical School researchers.
The researchers surveyed…
revere | November 2, 2007Immigrants traditionally get blamed for a country's ills and historically they have been feared for their ability to bring disease as well. The recent cases of the traveling lawyer (and here, passim)and the Mexican businessman with TB raised concerns that tuberculosis would be brought to the US or other low TB incidence countries by immigrants or travelers from countries where TB was prevalent. Now a new study from Norway suggests this doesn't happen:
Immigrants from countries with high rates of tuberculosis who move to countries of low TB incidence do not pose a public health threat to…
revere | November 1, 2007In an Open Letter to the American Chemical Society my Scibling Janet Stemwedel at Adventures in Ethics and Science, an ACS member, asked several pointed questions about how the Society was running its publications. One of the flagship publications is Chemical & Engineering News, whose editor in chief, Rudy Baum responded to her via email and she posted it, without comment, on her blog. That is right and proper. But I am under no constraint, so I will comment. If I were polite, I'd say Baum's response was disingenuous. But I'm not so polite, so I'll just say I don't believe him.…