revere | July 19, 2007This is a follow-up to the Salmonella outbreak at the Taste of Chicago 2007 outdoor food festival we reported a couple of days ago. The size of the outbreak continues to grow, with 636 reported illnesses, 66 of them laboratory confirmed as Salmonella serotype Heidelberg (one of the more common serotypes; CBS2, Chicago via ProMed). Fifteen people wound up in the hospital. An unusual aspect is that authorities have been able to pinpoint the source as a particular menu item, Hommus Shirazi, served at one booth at the fair. Even more unusual is that pictures of the booth and the Hommus Shirazi…
revere | July 18, 2007Yesterday the Libyan Supreme Council commuted the death sentences of five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian-Bulgarian doctor to life in prison. The Tripoli 6 have become a cause celebre in the scientific and diplomatic communities when Libyan courts, after holding them in prison for eight years, refused to hear solid scientific evidence exonerating them from a charge they deliberately infected over 400 children in the Al-Fateh Hospital in Benghazi. in 1998 (for more background, see here). Poor hospital hygiene is the presumed source of the tragic infections which so far have claimed the…
revere | July 18, 2007A "cytokine storm" as the lethal element in H5N1 infection is back, not with a bang but a whimper. Maybe. Here's the gist, from the ever reliable Helen Branswell:
New research suggests successful treatment of the H5N1 avian flu virus requires targeting the virus, not the overwhelming immune response it triggers.
The study, done in mice genetically engineered to lack critical immune system chemicals called cytokines, found these mice were as likely to die from H5N1 infection as mice armed with an intact immune system.
That suggests the activity of the virus, not the immune response it induces…
revere | July 17, 2007The case of the Tripoli 6 -- five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor now a Bulgarian citizen (for background see here) -- is in its final throes. It is not pretty. After a day's delay, word has come the Supreme Council has commuted the death sentence to life imprisonment, but with extradition to Bulgaria. We await details and no one with experience in this sad case will breathe easy until the six are on Bulgarian soil.
However this case comes out, scientists and science journalists played a very significant role in its evolution. Nature magazine, now the world's most prestigious and…
revere | July 17, 2007In the world of opera a diva is a prima donna, often problematic in behavior, but in the world of bird flu, DIVA stands for differentiating infected from vaccinated animals (DIVA). The bird flu DIVA relates to a problematic behavior of vaccinating poultry: after you've artificially induced them to produce antibodies against bird flu, you are faced with the trying to tell if a bird with antibodies against bird flu got it artificially or naturally. Since antibody detection is the main screening method for poultry infection with avian influenza virus most countries won't accept imports of…
revere | July 16, 2007Many Republicans and most Democrats in Congress seem to agree on at least one thing: President Bush is full of crap. Not about Iraq. Virtually all Republicans disagree with the rest of us on that. No, what they agree on is that the federal government should expand, not deep six, the Children's Health Insurance Program. 7.4 million children were covered at one time or another last year but it will expire on September 30. For 6 months a bipartisan group in the Senate Finance Committee has been crafting a compromise bill to cover the 8 million children in the US with no health insurance at all.…
revere | July 16, 2007So now we can all rest easy because we know where the 6 year old girl (not a boy as the Indon Ministry of Health previously reported) who died recently of H5N1 infection acquired the virus. The source of all H5N1 infections: birds. How do we know? Because an official of the Indonesian bird flu centre says so:
"She had indirect contact with dead chickens near her school," Joko Suyono, an official at the ministry's bird flu centre, said by telephone. The victim, from the city of Cilegon in Banten province, had initially been identified as a six-year-old boy, but Suyono said this was due to a…
revere | July 15, 2007I must confess to a (possibly unhealthy) fascination for the topic of food poisoning. You know the kind. First you're afraid you're going to die. Then you're afraid you're not going to die. When I taught the food sanitation course I loved showing 1960s US Army "barf films" meant to train food handlers. I could never figure out if it was real vomit coming out of the mouths of the recruits hanging over the sides of their barracks cots or staged. I still don't know.
Anyway, with such obsessions you can understand why my attention was drawn to the story of salmonella poisoning that occurred last…
revere | July 15, 2007A couple of days ago my SciBling, PZ, at Pharyngula, posted a characteristically funny and on target rant about the preternaturally religious country we both live in. Displaying a map of the US, thematically colored by frequency of religious affiliation, he commented:
It shows the concentration of ignorant, deluded, wicked, foolish, or oppressed victims of obsolete mythologies in the United States, with the lighter colors being the most enlightened and the dark reds being the most repressed and misinformed. (PZ, "I'm surrounded!" at Pharyngula)
Some people took great exception to this (see…
revere | July 14, 2007When last we looked at the benzene-in-soda lawsuit the dominoes were starting to fall as Coca Cola settled (for general background see here, here, here, here, here and the Environmental Working Group site). Sure enough, the rest of the soft drink makers have now settled.
PepsiCo and several other soft drink manufacturers have agreed to a settlement in a lawsuit brought against the companies alleging their products contained cancer-causing benzene.
The companies said they have agreed to reformulate - or have already reformulated - the drinks to make sure the ingredients they contain will not…
revere | July 13, 2007Michael Moore, whose movie on US health care, Sicko, is said to be a devastating indictment of said system (haven't seen it yet), had a bit of dust up recently with CNN's health correspondent, Dr. Sanjay Gupta. You can see it on the video linked below. Here's the scenario. With Moore as an upcoming guest of Wolf Blitzer (one of the least bright of the low wattage dimbulbs the network barfs up nightly), CNN runs a Gupta "fact check" of the movie which largely confirms Moore's facts but alleges minor discrepancies which Gupta characterizes as "fudging the facts." The odd thing is that Moore is…
revere | July 13, 2007The bird flu stories from Indonesia have a sameness to them so it is sometimes hard to remember these are real people. Someone's little girl or boy, sister, brother, father, cousin, best friend. They are just another "6-year-old boy died of bird flu at the weekend, a health official said on Thursday." I'm not blaming anyone of heartlessness. This is a normal way to react. It is also normal to think you know how the disease is transmitted and if you see a circumstance remotely like your pre-conceived notion, you stop searching for other causes. But in the case of the 6 year old just mentioned…
revere | July 12, 2007Maybe someday I'll get tired of posting stories like this, but that day has yet to come. This is from BoingBoing, on how to smuggle dangerous liquids onto an airplane. The dangerous liquid in this case was a bottle of Vidalia Onion salad dressing. It is dangerous because it was more than 3 ounces and not in a single, quart-size, zip-top, clear plastic bag," as per TSA rules. Three ounces is the rule, because, according to BoingBoing, that is the size ll liquids become high explosives (unless they are bought at duty-free store). Here is how to do it. Warning: reading further will make you…
revere | July 12, 2007Oh, good. We're going to have more high containment (BSL4) laboratories to handle the world's most dangerous organisms, the ones for which there is no cure and usually no vaccine. Also bioweapons agents like anthrax and smallpox. Lovely. Where? We don't know yet. The list of candidates was narrowed to five for $450 million in federal dollars for a national lab to replace the one in Plum Island, NY. The ones that didn't make it are all states with a poor science infrastructure. You know, states like California, Oklahoma, Maryland, Missouri, Wisconsin and Kentucky/Tennessee. The ones that did?…
revere | July 11, 2007I'd like to support someone who speaks out againstmuzzling of science by political hacks. Which is just what Bush's last Surgeon General, Richard Carmona did today at a congressional hearing. But frankly, it's a bit late. Many of us were quite critical of the "invisible Surgeon General," the person who was supposed to be "the nation's doctor" but whom nobody heard or saw. We didn't know if it was because he agreed with the administration on the hot button issues upon which he was utterly silent (e.g., sex education, stem cells, second hand smoke) or whether he buckled to pressure. According…
revere | July 11, 2007The final act in the drama of five Bulgarian nurses and one Palestinian doctor imprisoned for seven years and sentenced to death by firing squad in Libya after being accused of deliberately infecting over 400 chidren with HIV in a children's hospital in Bengazi (see posts here) is now being played out in the Libyan capital of Tripoli:
Libya's Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld death sentences on six foreign medics for infecting Libyan children with HIV, a ruling that paves the way for moves by Muammar Gaddafi's government to win their freedom.
Experts said the ruling completed the role of the…
revere | July 11, 2007If you aren't worried about bird flu you probably aren't in the poultry business. The pandemic that has yet to materialize for humans is already here for birds, where it is called a panzootic. And it is taking a toll. When highly pathogenic H5N1 surfaced again in Germany and France in the heart of western Europe Japan banned imports of German poultry while Egypt banned French and German poultry. Egypt already has more bird flu than any country outside of Asia, so they are just trying to prevent a bad situation from getting worse.
Meanwhile West Virginia's annual poultry festival was canceled…
revere | July 10, 2007When terrorists attacked the symbolic center of American economic power on September 11 it wasn't the first time:
On 16 September 1920, throngs of brokers, clerks, and office workers poured from the buildings lining New York City's Wall Street as a nearby church bell struck twelve o'clock. The narrow cobblestone street became a river of sputtering automobiles and scurrying pedestrians as the financial district employees set out to make the most of their mid-day break.
Traveling opposite the egressing crowds, an elderly bay horse plodded along Wall Street pulling a nondescript wagon and a…
revere | July 10, 2007CDC recommends (MMWR Recomm Rep. 2005 Jul 29;54(RR-8):1-40) hospitalized patients with influenza A be placed under standard and droplet isolation precautions for 5 days after the onset of their symptoms. This is based on studies of volunteers who received live attenuated flu vaccine drops in their noses. After 7 days only 1 of 18 were shedding virus. One might wonder if attenuated flu vaccine in healthy volunteers is the best way to estimate the length of viral shedding. A new paper of viral shedding in hospitalized elderly patients at the Mayo Clinic suggests it isn't. Sensitive methods for…
revere | July 9, 2007Caffeine doesn't bother me. I seem to be able to drink it at bedtime and then go right to sleep. But there are a lot of people caffeine does bother. A lot. So how much caffeine is in various foodstuffs, like carbonated beverages, is a matter of interest. It is added intentionally for its CNS stimulating effect. In other words, it's a drug. The fact there is caffeine in the product is on the label but the amount isn't.
Colas, pepper-like beverages and citrus beverages usually or often contain caffeine. A paper published ahead of print in the Journal of Food Science shows there is huge…