revere | November 1, 2007I've just returned from a short trip to the Emiglia Romagna region of northern Italy. The area around Bologna (site of the world's first medical school) is said by most Italians to have the second best food in all of Italy (the best is usually "Grandma's house"). It also has chikungunya, an imported arbovirus infection whose vector is the Tiger mosquito, Aedes albopictus.
This nasty little daytime biter was first seen near Genoa (on the other side of Italy near the French border) in 1990 but was seen in the Veneto (the region next to Emiglia Romagna) in 1992, apparently on tires imported from…
revere | October 31, 2007Pesticides are one of the few kinds of chemicals specially designed to kill living things that we intentionally put into our environment in high volume. A large class of pesticides are the organophosphates (OPs), agents that affect the normal process of nerve impulse transmission.
What we call pests are one kind of organism they can kill, but OPs are unaware of our human categories like "pest." They are also adept at killing and sickening other organisms. Like us. They do it frighteningly often in the developing world, and they do it in the developed world as well. There is a nice Jack…
revere | October 31, 2007I am a strong supporter of privacy and civil liberties. But I confess I don't get the opposition to this rule, just promulgated by FDA on an expedited basis, without going through public comment:
In a public health emergency, suspected victims would no longer have to give permission before experimental tests could be run to determine why they're sick, under a federal rule published Wednesday. Privacy experts called the exception unnecessary, ripe for abuse and an override of state informed-consent laws.
Health care workers will be free to run experimental tests on blood and other samples…
revere | October 30, 2007And today, too. So they're keeping a list, but unlike Santa Claus they're not checking it twice. Or even once. The list is the US government's terrorist watch list that today -- like yesterday and the day before and tomorrow -- grew by over 500 names. The terrorists are either being created at record rates or there are an awful lot of terrorists out there. Already the list has three quarters of a million names on it. Maybe yours. Or someone with the same name as yours.
The list is used to check people entering the country at airports and border crossings. But if Leonard Boyle, director of…
revere | October 30, 2007Some of the best moments in a scientist's life come when things don't go as planned. Or rather, when the world tells you something you never suspected and weren't even looking for. Ah, those lucky folks at the University of Warwick:
The researchers were exploring whether release of ATP (an important signaling and energy carrying molecule) influenced the development of locomotion in frogs. Their experiment introduced molecules called ectoenzymes (normally found on the outside surface of cells) into frog embryos at one of the earliest stages when the frogs-to-be were just 8 cells in size. Three…
revere | October 29, 2007Bruce Schneier, the security guru at Wired's Danger Room blog, reminds us of something important:
It's not true that no one worries about terrorists attacking chemical plants, it's just that our politics seem to leave us unable to deal with the threat. (Wired)
The chemical security problem is as urgent as it is obvious. Chemical plants are potentially static weapons of mass destruction: large volumes of ammonia, chlorine, highly flammables like propane, large repositories of chlorinated organic solvents and chemical feedstocks like phosgene and more. It's not just targeting the facility for…
revere | October 29, 2007If you've heard of the disease distemper it may be because you had to get your dog vaccinated against it. Dog or canine distemper is caused by a measles-like virus, Canine Distemper Virus, but it doesn't just affect dogs. It is capable of jumping to other species and wiped out about 10% of the world's smallest seals, the Caspian seals. Other carnivores that have taken a big hit from CDV are the Tasmanian tiger and black-footed ferret. It can infect infect lions and hyenas and probably other animals in the wild. So the question of what enables the dog virus to jump to other species is not just…
revere | October 28, 2007Idaho Republican Senator Larry Craig continues to wage his lonely and courageous effort to clear himself from charge his "wide stance" toilet habits led to the unjust accusation he was actually engaged in soliciting sex from a man in the next stall (who turned out to be an undercover police officer staked out in a restroom with a reputation as a meeting place for such liaisons). I know it looks bad. But there are enough other stories about to show how easy it is to mistakenly judge restroom visits. One of my favorite blogs, Brain Police, reminds us of just such a case, as reported by the…
revere | October 28, 2007A Jewish website has an interesting critique of the new popularity of
the current spate of books on atheism (I refuse to call it the New
Atheism; there's nothing new, different or unusual about it except
that a lot of people are reading it). The argument is this: the
"militancy" of the new books is a ready-made scapegoat for a
"crumbling moral landscape." The germ of a good idea is never
followed up, however. Instead of discussing the crumbling moral
landscape itself (an idea we shouldn't take for granted but examine
critically), Rabbi Steven Pearce instead turns his venom on the
scapegoats.…
revere | October 27, 2007Puffer fish are notorious. Considerable delicacy in Japan (a taste adopted by some non-Japanese Foodies), they come with a side of risk: some puffer fish have the potent lethal toxins tetrodotoxin and/or saxitoxin, neurotoxins more than 1000 times the lethal potency of cyanide:
Symptoms start within 20 minutes to 2 hours after eating the toxic fish. Initial symptoms include tingling of the lips and mouth, followed by dizziness, tingling in the extremities, problems with speaking, balance, muscle weakness and paralysis, vomiting, and diarrhea. In severe intoxications, death can result from…
revere | October 26, 2007On Monday President Bush asked for another $46 billion dollars to send down the rat hole of his Iraq and Afghanistan debacles. That makes just about $200 billion dollars for this fiscal year. Two hundred billion dollars. Congress has already ponied up almost half a trillion dollars. Half a trillion. Trillion. A dollar bill is a bit more than 0.1 mm thick. This year's 200 billion is 2 times 107 meters, or a stack of dollar bills about 200,000 football fields in height, or about a 120 mile stack. That's just this fiscal year. The estimated total is two and half times this.
For what. Oil. If…
revere | October 26, 2007Two months ago Germany reported H5N1 in asymptomatic ducks and geese.
Now the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization is saying this may be
a sign that there is already a reservoir of hidden infection in
healthy domestic birds in Europe. The FAO points to a huge popuation
of chicken and waterfowl in the Black Sea area that are similar to
asian bird populations and in contact with them via migration. FAO
wants more surveillance of domestic ducks and geese in some eastern
European countries that have not kept up as much as their western
European neighbors:
"It seems that a new chapter in the…
revere | October 25, 2007Gold salts have been used for a long time to treat arthritis, although how it worked or more pertinently, if it worked, was unclear. Injecting gold salts for inflamed and swollen rheumatic joints took weeks to work and often had nasty side effects: rashes, mouth ulcers, impaired kidney function and sometimes bone marrow depression. My pharmacology professor in medical school taught us the only thing gold was good for as a drug was "itchy palm disease." Now the chief of rheumatology at Duke, DAvid Pisetsky, is telling us we shouldn't be so dismissive:
&
"We scientists have really never…
revere | October 25, 2007The "experts" have spoken to WHO and WHO has spoken to us: because of the march of science, there's been a large upswing in the estimates of how much vaccine the world could produce in a pandemic -- if such a vaccine existed and there was a way to deliver it. But if there was one and it could be delivered, then WHO thinks we could produce up to a 4.5 billion doses by 2010 as a result of new manufacturing technologies and techniques to make the produced antigen go farther. A lot of "ifs," to be sure, but without the ability to make the stuff the rest doesn't matter.
At the moment we make a…
revere | October 24, 2007CDC Director Julie Gerberding's draft testimony to be presented before a Senate committee was "eviscerated" by the Office of Management and Budget according to an AP story by Josef Hebert (hat tip MF). The missing pieces related to the potential health impacts of climate change:
Her testimony before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee had much less information on health risks than a much longer draft version Gerberding submitted to the White House Office of Management and Budget for review in advance of her appearance.
"It was eviscerated," said a CDC official, familiar with…
revere | October 24, 2007There's a line forming for the pandemic vaccine that doesn't yet exist. Sort of like a new Harry Potter book except it's not first come first served. Like a sinking ship, it's (pregnant) women and children first -- or among the first. The deployed military? Police, I understand. But deployed military? They come ahead of critical infrastructure (power, water, communications) and older children? They come ahead of food and agricultural workers?
"Certain military personnel like deployed forces would get vaccinated before certain other military personnel," HHS science adviser William Raub said in…
revere | October 23, 2007Two weeks ago we reported getting an anonymous email from within the fetid bowels of the American Chemical Society. We weren't the only ones. Apparently it was also sent to college librarians, ACS administrators and a science writing listserv. Now it is making its way onto more conventional media (more conventional than this blog, anyway; but you heard it here first, by two weeks):
It said that the ACS is growing more corporate in structure and described how it manages the 36 chemical journals under its purview. Among other criticisms, the anonymous Emailer wrote that the bonuses given to ACS…
revere | October 23, 2007If you have or have had small children you may be all too familiar with earaches. When our kids were small we felt as if we were single-handedly supporting the amoxicillin makers. A major cause of middle ear infection is the organism Streptococcus pneumoniae (S. pneumoniae), which sometimes it invades other tissues and causes bacterial meningitis (not the kind that you read about killing healthy teenagers, but bad enough) and sometimes other body sites. It is also a cause of pneumonia in adults and was a common cause of secondary bacterial pneumonia in the 1918 flu. That was then. Now there…
revere | October 22, 2007I like movies but I'm not a film buff. I have no reason why I find cinema's most famous scream interesting. But I do:
In case you haven't had enough, here's a Wilhelm scream compilation:
Just because.
revere | October 22, 2007Human infection with West Nile Virus (WNV) first made its appearance in the US in 1999 in, of all places, Queens, New York. Humans are an incidental host of the virus which circulates in small land based birds, passing between them via mosquitoes. It's hard to find a place to bite a bird if you are a mosquito, but a number of species know just where to look. There is a rim around the eye, for example, where the bird's blood is accessible via a bite. The female mosquito needs the protein in blood to ovulate. Sometimes the mosquito also bites a human and a WNV infection can occur in a human,…