revere | July 9, 2007CIDRAP had an interesting story about some Stanford undergraduates who designed a local pandemic flu hotline staffed by home-based volunteers. The idea emerged from a course in innovation and "entrepreneurship." The course was designed to teach students the rudiments of taking an idea of social utility and getting it implemented and they are fairly common. They give students a perspective on the many steps and obstacles between a good idea and a good product in the real world. But I sometimes wonder if they teach the right things.
First the idea:
The classes aim to teach students methods of…
revere | July 8, 2007Some federal money ($430 million) for pandemic preparedness is now being released to help states and communities "to respond to bioterror attacks, infectious disease, and natural disasters that may cause mass casualties." The bulk of federal pan flu money has been for procurement of vaccines and antivirals. Over the years money$2 billion has been released to increase acute care capacity. There isn't a lot of evidence we are in much better shape for all that. So do we think this new bolus of dough will help?
The good news is that it isn't more procurement money for vaccine and antivirals. It's…
revere | July 8, 2007The only triple pun I know is in a stanza from a Pete Seeger song, Passing Through:
I saw Adam leave the garden
With an apple in his hand,
I said, "Now you're out
What are you gonna do?
Plant some crops and pray for rain,
Maybe raise a little Cain,
I'm an orphan and I'm only passing through." (words and music by Dick Blakeslee)
Raise a little Cain/cane. Heh, heh.
It's fine for Adam to pray for rain and make a clever joke. Adam didn't exist. The Governor of Alabama does. Yesterday marked the end of the Governor's call for a Week of Prayer for Rain in Alabama. Yes. That's right. A state-…
revere | July 7, 2007Prepping for bird flu isn't a very good excuse. Excuse for what? Being a racist pig:
A former British National Party member from Lancashire accused of plotting to make bombs from chemicals he bought on the internet has claimed the substances were for cleaning his false teeth and unblocking drains.
Robert Cottage, 49, of Colne, told Manchester Crown Court he thought some of the other chemicals could be used to protect him from bird flu and purify water if supplies were cut off during civil unrest - two of his greatest fears. (Pendleton Today)
I know. Some of you might be saying, "Hey, I'm…
revere | July 6, 2007If you live in the US pay taxes and some of those taxes go to support important basic research into the causes of disease. Most of that research is disbursed through an elaborate peer-reviewed granting system at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The point of doing that research is to tell the world scientific community what you have found. "Normal" scientific progress is incremental, building on the work of other scientists. Paying for that research has been shown to be a good investment that has paid for itself many times over. But if you've paid for it once in taxes, why should you…
revere | July 6, 2007France, Germany, the Czech Republic and possibly Austria are the latest EU countries to have a recurrence of H5N1 (bird flu) in wild birds or domestic poultry. Last year also saw many EU countries afflicted, but until the UK turkey outbreak in February (see here, here, here and here) some hoped it wouldn't come back. Now it is spreading again. No surprise, really. Wherever and however it finds a place in birds it seems very hard, if not impossible, to eradicate permanently.
That, of course, is the problem. Let's forget about the argument as to whether a pandemic is "inevitable" because…
revere | July 5, 2007I'd rather have a governor that said the right things about the environment, even if he acted to undercut his self-proclaimed goals, than one who said the most reactionary, retrograde and ignorant things. But why should I have to choose? Take Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of California who has gotten brownie points for bucking the Bush administration on global warming even though he is a Republican. Maybe it says something about the rock bottom expectations we have about anything a Republican says on the environment that some progressives have praised him. But he still acts like a typical…
revere | July 5, 2007There was a story about prepping for a pandemic in the Washington Post a couple of weeks ago I made note of but didn't get to commenting on. Now's my chance.
When Alexandrians opened their June FYI newsletter, out slipped a slick brochure with a photo of a stern-faced crowd staring out from the cover. "Be Ready, Alexandria!" the boldface type warned, "For a Pandemic Flu Outbreak."
[snip]
"We must take this risk very seriously," Mayor William D. Euille said in an interview. "If a pandemic were to occur, we are going to have a lot of people infected. People are going to die. Some people are…
revere | July 4, 2007A lot of Republicans have claimed public discontent over the War in Iraq is a creature of a press out to distort the "successes" of a Noble Crusade. The President himself has said things along this line. So has Whitehouse Press Secretary Tony Snow. We expect governments and their toadies to blame someone else for bad news and the press is a handy whipping boy. So there's nothing surprising to hear the same story line from Bush's counterparts in the Chinese government (or as they used to be called in my youth, the ChiComs):
China's food safety problems are partly a result of misunderstandings…
revere | July 4, 2007It now turns out that the XDR-TB case which caused such an uproar last month (see our posts here) wasn't XDR-TB at all but MDR-TB, a treatable form of the disease:
Andrew Speaker was diagnosed in May with extensively drug resistant TB, based on an analysis of a sample taken in March by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The XDR-TB, as it is called, is considered dangerously difficult to treat.
But three later tests have all shown Speaker's TB to be a milder form of the disease, multidrug-resistant TB, a federal health official said on condition of anonymity before a news…
revere | July 3, 2007A year may not seem like a long time, but everything's relative. For Texas A&M University a year was 51 weeks too long since they were required to report potential breaches of laboratory safety protections in the federally financed biodefense lab they ran within seven days. This "failure to communicate" happened twice, once when researchers got ill with brucellosis and almost at the same time when it was found other lab workers had become infected with Q fever (see our posts here and here). We know about this because of The Sunshine Project, a citizen watchdog group that discovered the…
revere | July 3, 2007Influenza is primarily a disease of birds but other animals, including mammals, can be infected. Humans are mammals, of course, and we know humans get flu. But there are 144 different subtypes of influenza A and mostly they infect birds. When H5N1 jumped from birds to humans in Hong Kong in 1997 it was a surprise. It was thought the bird viruses needed to acquire human specificity by mixing bird and human viruses in a suitable animal (usually thought to be the pig). Pigs are very lucky. They can be infected by both human and bird viruses. That seemed to be what happened in the 1957 and 1968…
revere | July 2, 2007Calories are a measure of heat. A small calorie is the amount of heat it takes to raise a gram of water from 3.5 degrees centigrade to 4.5 degrees centigrade. A large Calorie (capital C, also called a kilocalorie) is the amount of heat it takes to raise a kilogram of water (2.2 lbs) from 3.5o C. to 4.5o C. (OK, technically these are 4o calories, so don't write me to complain). The "Calories" we read about in nutrition are large calories. The prototypical male weighs 70 kg. So 70 Calories of heat energy released from food is enough to heat him up one degree centigrade. That's enough to be…
revere | July 2, 2007The New Scientist has a story this week asking whether flu vaccines really protects the elderly. It's not a new question. Careful epidemiological analyses of national mortality data has seemed to show no change in mortality amongst the elderly when vaccination for seasonal influenza ramped up starting in 1980. On the other hand, careful randomized clinical trials in specific populations seemed to show substantial protection.
The problem is more technically difficult than appears at first sight. On the one hand in a clinical trial you are making individual level measurements of both exposure (…
revere | July 1, 2007The folks who sell carbon monoxide monitors use the phrase "a-colorless-odorless-gas-that-can-kill-you-in-your-sleep" as if it were one word. I guess they use it often enough that it is one word to them. In fact people do die from carbon monoxide, around 500 every year. A sign of monoxide poisoning in the emergency department is an unconscious patient with cherry red lips. Carbon monoxide poisons by latching tightly to hemoglobin, preventing this protein from carrying out its function of binding oxygen. The bound carbon monixide produces carboxyhemoglobin instead of oxyhemoglobin. Carboxy…
revere | July 1, 2007Suppose you had a dog and, mirabile dictu, you found he was able to do mathematics? What would you thnk?
Stan Tuten held up a board and scribbled down a basic algebra problem:
If a=2, and b=3, what is axb-1?
Micah, a terrier mix with penetrating eyes like black molasses, glanced at the board.
"Micah?" said Dr. Cindy Tuten, a physician and Stan Tuten's wife. "Do you understand the problem?"
She held one hand high in the air with a bowl of cut tomatoes and cooked chicken (the dog's reward) and the other out for the dog's answer. Micah tapped his paw once.
"Once means 'yes' and twice means 'no…
revere | June 30, 2007The British Medical Journal is an odd thing. I was very impressed when they went Open Access a few years ago, only to be disappointed when they stopped, even though their new editor, Fiona Godlee, came over from the world's leading Open Access publisher of medical journals, BioMed Central. Recently they have been publishing pieces that seem to challenge conventional wisdom. This has the odor of "catch up to The Lancet" about it, but maybe not. In any event, conventional wisdom isn't always wrong. In fact it is mainly conventional because it is wise thinking. Not always, but usually. So it's…
revere | June 29, 2007The Republican wannabees are all making their pilgrimages to a single institution of Higher Learning, these days. Regent University. And why not. As Rudi Giuliani said the other day to the faculty and students there: "The Amount Of Influence You Have Is Really, Really Terrific." Regent University is Pat Robertson's place: Christian Leadership to Change the World. If you've never heard of Regent, and its amazing academic stature, it's probably because you haven't been perusing the rankings in the U.S. News and World Report evaluation of higher education. Well, maybe you have and just didn't…
revere | June 29, 2007Emerging infectious diseases don't appear out of thin air. Mostly (75%), they come from animals. In the language of science, they are zoonoses. So veterinary pathologists see themselves on the front line of early warning against emerging disease and runaway pandemic disease. Consider bird flu:
So is the threat real? "Whether the bird flu virus will spread to North America is unpredictable at this time," says Corrie Brown, Diplomate of the American College of Veterinary Pathologists (ACVP) and a University of Georgia professor of veterinary medicine. "Although the likelihood of this mutation…
revere | June 28, 2007Since I'm a professor I notice stories about professor's rights. I'm all for having my rights. But there are some rights I don't think professors need to have or should have:
The Nevada System of Higher Education's Board of Regents has endorsed a plan that would encourage faculty and staff members to go about their business armed with guns that could be used to thwart an attack like the one that took 32 lives at Virginia Tech in April. According to the Web site of KLAS, a local television station in Las Vegas, the regents approved a plan under which the system would pay a $3,000 fee for each…