revere | August 29, 2007This is a public health blog run by an old geezer (or geezers, depending upon how many of us there are), but if you are a crazed gamer with an age in the low double digits (or not), this post is for you. The part for you is below the fold, at the end. But first some background.
Despite my age, I'm always looking for new and interesting ways to do public health and a year or two ago I started to look at the virtual reality "game" Second Life. I posted about it, noting that CDC had a tiny outpost there, NOAA had a spiffy island set-up, and several notables had avatars there, too: Richard Posner…
revere | August 28, 2007I like John Edwards and tend to agree with him on poverty and campaign finance, although his Iraq war opposition is weak and ambiguous. But he's got a lot of company there, unfortunately. The one thing you can say about the Republican candidates is their pro-war stance isn't ambiguous. It is explicit -- disgustingly so. But that's not what this post is about. It's about different Edwards disappointment, his newly announced position on cancer policy. For someone who was a plaintiff's lawyer in tort cases and whose wife is a cancer patient, his policy is mostly silent about a public health…
revere | August 28, 2007A recent article in TimesOnline (hat tip RobT) raises an inevitable and interesting question about how we are going to ration scarce high tech medical resources in a pandemic. The article reports on a paper by Canadian scientists on SARS patients indicating that certain patterns of protein expression offer clues to clinical prognosis. In particular, the researchers found that protein expression patterns for interferons, known to participate in the innate immune system's reaction to viral infections, seem to indicate that one of two distinct patterns predict a relatively good prognosis, the…
revere | August 27, 2007We in public health need all the advocates we can get, so it's heartening to know that a major pharmaceutical company, Allergan, Inc., has hired a big name lobbying firm to "lobby on public health issues":
Allergan Inc., which makes eye care products and Botox anti-wrinkle injections, hired McKenna, Long & Aldridge to lobby the federal government.
The firm is expected to lobby on public health issues, according to a form posted online Aug. 8 by the Senate's public records office.
Under a federal law enacted in 1995, lobbyists are required to disclose activities that could influence…
revere | August 27, 2007I'm at the beach and it's hot. It's supposed to be that way at the beach. When I get overheated I head back to the unit, which is air conditioned, and I cool off. Actually, I don't. I stay the same temperature (body temperature), but that aside, it's no problem. But not everyone is so lucky and recently a good section of the US south has been having a heat wave. The same thing happens every summer (although some are worse than others), and two years ago I wrote about this on the old site. Instead of just reposting it I decided to rewrite it. At the time I was struck by a headline in the…
revere | August 26, 2007I have an admission to make. For the last couple of weeks I have been bootlegging off of whatever available wifi I could find. This has found me out on the porch of our unit, balancing my laptop on a the railing, trying to catch a couple of waves. Sick? Mrs. R. thinks so. It's not that I don't want to pay for wifi. I'd gladly pay them if I had any idea where they were and I could connect easily. I have Comcast service at home and this unit is cabled by Comcast, too, so if I could move the service temporarily I would. But I can't do that and I don't have a modem. Anyway, blogging at 28K is…
revere | August 26, 2007I don't mean to pick a fight with a fellow Science Blogger, but I'm afraid I have to. If not a fight, at least register a strenuous remonstrance, if I may frame it that way. The object of my displeasure is Matt Nisbet over at Framing Science, who seems to have a bee in his neurons about what he calls "The New Atheists," meaning those atheists who say, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more." Since that is one of the reasons for our Freethinker Sunday Sermonettes, I might be forgiven for taking it somewhat personally.
Since I have an interest in the "framing" issue myself, and…
revere | August 25, 2007The Reveres and spouses are not big moviegoers, although when on vacation we do like to take in a flick. The movie Transformers is not likely to be the one we'd pick, but one thing for sure: whichever one it is won't be shown at one the theaters of the world's largest chain, Regal Entertainment Group. Not since they decided to go after a 19 year old young woman who filmed 20 seconds of Transformers at one of their theaters. She wanted to show it to her 13 year old brother to show him what it looked like. She subsequently pled guilty to a charge of unlawful recording of a movie:
The case is…
revere | August 24, 2007I'm at the beach and as you might expect there are a lot of seafood restaurants. While I'm not a big fish eater, I do appreciate the really neat kinds of food poisoning you can get from fish. Like scombroid:
Scombroid fish poisoning is an acute illness that occurs after eating fish containing high levels of histamine or other biogenic amines. Symptoms typically include facial flushing, sweating, rash, a burning or peppery taste in the mouth, diarrhea, and abdominal cramps and usually resolve within several hours without medical intervention. More severe symptoms (e.g., respiratory distress,…
revere | August 24, 2007Pandemic influenza gets its share of headlines but there are other viruses out there that also are good tabloid fodder, most notably Ebola virus which causes Ebola hemorrhagic fever, whose gruesome effects were depicted in Richard Preston's book, The Hot Zone. Ebola has some close relatives in the filovirus family, among them Marburg virus. Like Ebola it can cause a gruesome demise. Marburg has cause several outbreaks in Africa, one of the largest in Angola at the end of 2004, early 2005 (see the Wikipedia article on Marburg for more details). One of the enduring mysteries is where the virus…
revere | August 23, 2007If you were an organic farmer you might be a tad pissed if the government came along and sprayed your crop with pesticide without your consent, essentially spoiling it. But that's what happened near Sacramento north of the American River between July 30 and August 1, as the local mosquito control district did aerial spraying to "control" mosquitoes that might be carrying West Nile virus. They aprayed 86 square miles (55,000 acres), home to 375,000 people:
Lab tests by Environmental Micro Analysis, an independent lab in Woodland, showed crops from at least one farm in Citrus Heights were…
revere | August 23, 2007"Protecting the border" is a battle cry for the most reactionary US politicians but when it comes to flu, they are as unlikely to be successful as they are for people. However it might be the Canadians, who have a functioning public health system, who are most at risk from a surge of US citizens fleeing their own poverty-stricken, understaffed and dysfunctional health care society that will be most interested in keeping those American illegal aliens out of their hospitals. This week the heads of state of Mexico, Canada and the US discussed what to do in a pandemic and they all agreed on the…
revere | August 22, 2007One of my colleagues (a clinical psychologist) was once asked the difference between a psychiatrist and a psychologist. "You have to understand," he said, "that a psychiatrist doesn't have a PhD." It turns out there is at least one more difference. The professional association of psychiatrists have rejected the idea it is ethical for a medical doctor to be complicit in interrogation abuse or abusive conditions under which interrogations are conducted. The professional association of psychologists have twice declined to take that step. I think that's a more telling difference than the nature…
revere | August 22, 2007[Given our posts (here, here) on the particularly severe flu season in Australia, we thought it useful to remind ourselves that a bad flu season can be really bad -- worse than the 1918 pandemic in some locations. Here is a post we did back in April 2006 about an interesting paper (see link in post) by Cecile Viboud and her colleagues at NIH that looks at historical records on flu mortality. Flu is a bad disease, pandemic strain or not. Why some flu is worse than others we don't know.]
Originally posted Friday, April 7, 2006:
We talk frequently about the H5N1 virus mutating to a form…
revere | August 21, 2007You wonder when they will ever learn -- or IF they will ever learn. In the wake of yesterday's announcement that the Director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, Dr. David Schwartz, will step aside while NIH does an inquiry into allegations of turmoil at the institute and management irregularities, comes a letter sent to NIEHS employees -- and as far as we know only NIEHS employees -- asking for reporting of any contacts with Congress:
Employees of the National Institutes of Health in North Carolina are being asked to report all contacts with Congress - a request that…
revere | August 21, 2007We keep seeing these discussions about the probability of a pandemic next year. Sometimes they center on the "overdue" for a pandemic notion, sometimes on using available data to give an estimate of the rough chances of a pandemic. In the latter category is this little contretemps in the UK:
Contingency plans drawn up by the NHS are based on a 3 per cent chance in any given year that the virus will mutate into a form that infects humans. However, an international review at a summit of avian flu experts put the risk of a pandemic during the next year as between 5 and 20 per cent.
Leading…
revere | August 20, 2007As promised, here is a second post on the situation in Australia, currently struggling through a very bad flu season. In the first post I quoted the late epidemiologist Irving Selikoff who referred to statistics as "people with the tears wiped away." Statistical summaries are the stock in trade of the public health profession but it is important to keep reminding ourselves of the ocean of tears we wipe away when we quote them.
So it's back to Australia:
He kissed her goodnight and she softly whispered: "I love you" so as not to wake their two young sons, fast asleep in her arms.
It was the…
revere | August 20, 2007In an email letter sent internally to all National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) personnel, its Director, Dr. David Schwartz, has announced he is temporarily stepping aside while the NIH Director, Dr. Elias Zerhouni, conducts an internal review of NIEHS and the National Toxicology Program (NATP), both of which have come under fire from congressional, internal and outside critics (see our posts, here, here and here). Here is the text of Dr. Schwartz's email, as we received it:
Dear Colleagues:
As you know, there have been recent inquiries by members of Congress and others…
revere | August 20, 2007This is about the particularly severe flu season being endured by our friends in Australia. Southern hemisphere, so the flu season is in full swing there, the reverse of the northern hemisphere. But "full swing" doesn't quite describe it, so I'm going to do this one in two parts ((all links from Flu Wiki Front Page, news for August 18). The great epidemiologist Irving Selikoff once described statistics as people with the tears wiped away. So the first post today will be statistics, or the equivalent, without the tears . Later today I'll do the other part:
As the flu epidemic continues to…
revere | August 19, 2007The big pandemic flu vaccine news of the moment has to be The Lancet report that vaccine maker GlaxoSmithKline has been able to get excellent antibody production against H5N1 with a new adjuvanted preparation that contains remarkably little viral antigen. This is important because the currently the only FDA approved pre-pandemic H5N1 vaccine uses more than 20 times as much (90 micrograms versus 3.8 micrograms) in an unadjuvanted preparation with much worse antibody response.
In today's Lancet, Isabel Leroux-Roels and colleagues report safety and immunogenicity data from a phase-1 dose-sparing…