revere | June 28, 2007You can't look at the bird flu news without seeing a new outbreak somewhere, whether it's in Bangladesh, Ghana, Togo, the Czech Republic, or Germany, or of course the old standbys, Vietnam, Indonesia and Eqypt. Lots of it around and I didn't give anywhere near the whole list. So it's curious to find this headline, "UN finds progress in tackling bird flu" in an AP story in the Houston Chronicle by Marta Falconi (same story and headline in Washington Post):
Scientists and officials gathering in Rome for a three-day technical meeting on bird flu said that in most cases the virus is rapidly…
revere | June 27, 2007I hope the Democrats are successful in stopping the Iraq atrocity. Out of Iraq. Now. But I must once again disagree -- strongly disagree -- with the notion that Iraq has distracted us from the "real" war against terrorism, the one in Afghanistan. This is a talking point of virtually all the Democratic presidential hopefuls and a distressingly large proportion of the progressive blogosphere. I must say again: Afghanistan was wrong, too.
That was the title of a post I put up in December 2005 at a time when Iraq looked less like the colossal screw up many of us knew it was. It was also a time…
revere | June 27, 2007Q-fever is an acute febrile disease which presents, as do so many infectious diseases, with "flu-like symptoms." It isn't cause by a flu virus, however, or any virus. It's caused by a bacterium, Coxiella burnetii. It is class B biowarfare agent, meant to cause debilitating illness amongst its targets. It rarely causes death, although it can, on occasion. It can also linger as a fairly serious chronic disease. You get it from exposure to infected livestock or dried materials from infected livestock. It doesn't take a lot of C. burnetii organisms to infect you. Typically the disease is seen in…
revere | June 26, 2007Many years ago a strange organism appeared outside a branch of Barclays Bank north of London. The first member of the public to encounter it in the wild was an actor from a TV series. We know how old it is from documentary evidence, but if we didn't we could still carbon date it. Carbon dating uses a weakly radioactive isotope of carbon, carbon-14. If we know the proportion of C-14 in the organism when it was born, we could use the known rate of decay of C-14 to determine the organism's age.
The organism in question apparently had a strong survival advantage and has since proliferated to an…
revere | June 26, 2007The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) may be the most incompetent and dysfunctional in the federal government (Katrina is one example; but only one). DHS also has a very expansive view of its role. Almost everything is a matter of homeland security. That includes epidemic disease, where there remains uncertainty as to who will do what to whom in the event of a pandemic. According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), they also want to give the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) the bird:
In an effort to prepare for H5N1, the USDA rolled out a series of measures including…
revere | June 25, 2007It is infuriating how stodgy biomedical sciences are in terms of information sharing. It's not clear how much of this is bred of inherent conservatism, the pressures of a very competitive field or just plain technobackwardness. But while mathematics and physics have had preprint servers for years, biomedicine has had nothing or virtually nothing (that last to cover myself in case I am forgetting something or just didn't know about it). What's a preprint server?
A preprint is a version of your scientific paper prior to its publication. Maybe it hasn't been submitted yet and you are circulating…
revere | June 25, 2007For a long time I (and many others) were of the opinion that the reported deaths from H5N1 and the extraordinaraily high Case Fatality Ratio (CFR; proportion of all infections that end fatally) was an over estimate due to underascertainment of infections that were mild, inapparent or just undiagnosed because they weren't severe enough to come to the attention of the medical care system. The reason for thinking this was that this is the pattern for most other infectious diseasesk, even serious ones like TB and cholera. Most of the infections are asymptomatic or at least undiagnosed. It is…
revere | June 24, 2007I just learned via Ben Cohen at World's Fair that George Bush has joined the anti-war movement. Of course I'll believe it when I see it, but he is saying the right things:
"Destroying human life to save human life is just not ethical." (President George Bush on his Saturday radio broadcast)
I don't think of Bush as the anti war type, but really -- the words are quite plain here and he has always emphasized he is a man of his word -- what else could this mean?
What else could this mean? George Bush is opposed to war.
revere | June 24, 2007There's been a bit of a buzz about a paper by Australian researcher Jennifer McKimm-Breschkin at the Toronto flu meetings last week. McKimm-Breschkin told the gathering of 1500 flu obsessed scientists just what they didn't want to hear: that she and her colleagues had evidence from the laboratory that clade 2 H5N1 avian influenza virus isolated from birds in Indonesia were becoming resistant to the only oral antiviral effective against the virus, oseltamivir (Tamiflu). In comparison to clade 1 (southeast asian) virus from a few years back, the sensitivity was 20 to 30 times less.
We'll have…
revere | June 24, 2007Epicurus' old questions are yet to be answered. Is [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil? -- David Hume, quoted in Konner, The Atheist's Bible
The tremendous number of bad things that happen to innocent people has always been a problem for flacks for an All Powerful and All Loving God. I'm always curious to see how they explain it. The latest contribution from Dr. John Pearrell, pastor of Gateway Community Church in Covington, Georgia is both refreshing in its…
revere | June 23, 2007I like Keith Olbermann's TV show, Countdown, and I couldn't care less about Paris Hilton. But watching him last night I was dismayed -- again -- by the meanness and stupidity and exploitative nature of his coverage of Paris Hilton. She isn't news anymore. If he insists on covering her, doing it in such a vicious and meanspirited way can only be to entertain and pander to the basest instincts of TV viewers. It says something about Olbermann and his TV colleagues on all the channels, regardless of politics, who are doing the same thing. What it says about them isn't very pretty.
I'll grant you…
revere | June 23, 2007A belated welcome to the progressive blogosphere (and our blogroll) to the Angry Toxicologist but still a very sincere one. The AT is appropriately angry about most of the same things that make us angry. TAT is a toxicologist. We do environmental epidemiology -- in the words of epidemiologist Richard Clapp, that's toxicology where you let the animals out of their cages. So we are in the same line of work, although for a change of pace we blog mostly about infectious disease. From the Left. That's what happens when you're angry.
Welcome to the public health blogosphere, AT. Whoever you are.
revere | June 23, 2007Show mercy to Scooter Libby but not an illegal immigrant. Sue grandmothers and single parents of ten years olds but let rich twenty somethings admit piracy to a national newspaper with no one making a peep. Justice must have her blindfold off.
But I shouldn't have said no one has made a peep. We have to make an exception for Mitchell Silverman, Florida lawyer, keen-eyed reader, and fighter for equal justice under the law. Mr. Silverman, bless his heart, recognized the clear evidence of a theft right before his eyes -- in the newspaper:
President Bush unwrapped Father's Days gifts Sunday at…
revere | June 22, 2007With all the concern about contamination of imported food ingredients, especially from a major exporter like China, you'd think the US Food and Drug Administration would be eager to make whatever information it has available to US food producers as quickly as possible. You know what's coming next:
Lee Sanders, a senior vice president with the American Bakers Association, requested FDA documents on imported honey in 2002. The Washington-based association wanted to know about a pesticide in honey imported from China, she said in an interview.
"You would hope that those types of requests would…
revere | June 22, 2007This site has a Creative Commons license on it. Essentially this means anyone can copy, distribute or transmit my blog posts for whatever purpose they want -- even commercial purposes. The only restriction is that this unrestrictive license travels with the post. If you use something from us you must permit anyone else to take the same post from your site without asking permission; and to attribute it to us at Effect Measure (i.e., give us credit, ideally including a link back to this blog).
We think this is a good model for influenza viruses, too. Because without it we are headed for…
revere | June 21, 2007Today there is a terrific post by economist Les Boden of Boston University School of Public Health over at The Pump Handle. It's about something many people here probably aren't interested in -- workers compensation. But the underlying issue should be of interest to everyone in the US and many other places.
It's about a giant and influential international industry. The insurance industry:
If something bad happens to an insured person or company, the insurer is supposed to help soften the financial blow. You need a $50,000 operation and your medical insurer is supposed to cover most, if not…
revere | June 21, 2007The prospect of a influenza pandemic has concentrated the minds of vaccine makers. There has been a lot of new research and development on newer, faster and cheaper ways to make flu vaccines. The antiviral field hasn't been quite as active, although now things seem to be picking up. Until now the antivirals (all four of them!) have been in two main classes, the old M2 inhibitors (adamantanes) and the newer neuraminidase inhibitors (oseltamivir, zanamivir; and waiting in the wings, peramivir). Now we are hearing about new drug targets:
One of the promising things about the work is that the…
revere | June 20, 2007As Declan Butler reports on his blog, the Tripoli 6 case is reaching its final phase. To summarize briefly, The Tripoli 6 are five Bulgarian nurses and one Palestinian doctor who have been imprisoned in Libya for 7 years and then condemned to death by firing squad on charges they deliberately infected some four hundred or more children with HIV in the hospital in Bengazi. Scientific work later demonstrated they could not have been the source of the infection. You can find previous posts we did on this here. On December 19 a new trial, called as a result of an appeal to the Libyan Supreme…
revere | June 20, 2007Many people have the impression the bird flu menace has receded. Much of this is based on its lack of media visibility. I don't blame the media. There is a lot happening in the world, editors get bird flu fatigue just as the rest of us do, and there doesn't seem to be a lot to say that hasn't been said before. Whichy of course is the problem. Things haven't changed.
Consider Africa:
Some African nations are experiencing a rapid spread of the H5N1 virus in poultry while a lack of equipped public health labs, customs surrounding chickens and poor surveillance hamper pandemic plans, a…
revere | June 19, 2007It's a myth that's hard to bust. The one that says the United States, the country that spends more on health care than any other, has the best medical care in the world to go with it. It hasn't been true for a long time. It doesn't. But it is part of the core belief of most Americans. I wonder who benefits most from that falsehood? But to the facts:
As early as 2000, the World Health Organization made the first attempt at ranking all the world's healthcare systems. The U.S. came in 37th out of 190 nations in the provision of healthcare. (France, according to the June 2000 report, was first.)…