revere | June 8, 2007We've written here about China's failure to share viral isolates, but we hope we've also made clear that many Chinese scientists have been forthcoming in sharing much other scientific information with colleagues in other countries about their experience with bird flu. A good example of interesting and valuable information has just appeared (published Ahead of Print in CDC's journal Emerging Infectious Diseases). The paper has details on six H5N1 cases that occurred in China between October 2005 and October 2006. The cases were all in urban areas and had no known exposure to sick poultry or…
revere | June 7, 2007We need to celebrate our victories, small as some are. I learned from my SciBling, Grrl, over at Living the Scientific Life that Elsevier is abandoning their ill gotten gains as enablers of international arms merchants, a role we and many others posted on. Her summary is excellent. Here's some more detail:
As first reported by The Scientist, the Anglo-Dutch publishing behemoth, which puts out more than 2,000 journals and 2,200 books annually, has bowed to pressure from leading scientists and will no longer organize trade shows for weapons merchants.
Despite the profitability of the company's…
revere | June 7, 2007A survey of doctors specializing in the infectious diseases of children attending a conference showed over half weren't very worried about a bird flu pandemic. I guess they know something I don't. Or maybe I've been reading the wrong things. Things like this:
The H5N1 bird flu virus in Indonesia may have undergone a mutation that allows it to jump more easily from poultry to humans, the head of the country's commission on bird flu control said on Wednesday.
[snip]
"In the past it took exposure of high intensity and density to the virus to get infected. There are now suspicions, early…
revere | June 6, 2007I don't usually do movie reviews here, much less reviews of movie reviews. But since I was pretty hard on Marc Siegel a year or two ago (I won't link to the posts since that would be just criticizing him all over again; they are on the old site), I'll take the time to say his movie review of Pandemic on the Hallmark channel didn't offend me. I wouldn't have written it that way, but there were some good things in it. What I liked about it was the balanced way he evaluated the veracity and plausibility of the facts portrayed in the movie. Dramatic presentations like this are a mode of public…
revere | June 6, 2007Last November a WHO study "stated" there was evidence a genetic factor was at work in the susceptibility to H5N1 because it appeared an abnormally high number of reported clusters involved only blood relatives. At the time I expressed some polite skepticism (Not All in Our Genes). Whether the observed data actually had more blood relative cases than would be expected bdepends on what one would expect. What you "expect" is the so-called null-distribution, which in turn depends on a plausible underlying probability model. Now a doctoral student working with Marc Lipsitch and his collaborators…
revere | June 5, 2007Many observers have known that politics has become an increasingly important part of CDC world. Now even the conventional media are noticing. From ABC News:.
The nation's first line of defense against these assaults, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is once again in the spotlight and facing questions about its handling of this latest medical alert. But an even larger question is often debated when it comes to the CDC -- the extent to which it is an agency influenced by politics.
For most government organizations, political influence is taken for granted. Yet the public is…
revere | June 5, 2007I'm just about done with the TB incident. I've said what I had to say (here, here, here and here) about the incident itself and TB on a plane in general. The one thing left is the significance for pandemic flu prevention.
I don't think there is any significance for pandemic prevention because at the moment we have no way to prevent a pandemic. We don't know what will make a pandemic happen or not happen, but if the biology will let it happen and a strain arises with easy transmissibility between people, then that's the ball game. Even if it burns out in one place it will happen again. And…
revere | June 4, 2007This really gripes me.
A Michigan man has been fined $400 and given 40 hours of community service for accessing an open wireless Internet connection outside a coffee shop.
Under a little known state law against computer hackers, Sam Peterson II, of Cedar Springs, Mich., faced a felony charge after cops found him on March 27 sitting in front of the Re-Union Street Café in Sparta, Mich., surfing the Web from his brand-new laptop.
Last week, Peterson chose to pay the fine instead as part of a jail-diversion program. (FoxNews; hat tip Boingboing)
Here's the story. The café offered free wireless…
revere | June 4, 2007Most influenza subtypes are said to be diseases of birds, so it is somewhat surprising there hasn't been more study of poultry workers or veterinarians exposed to infected birds in the course of their work. A study by Gregory Gray and his team at , an epidemiologist at the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases, at the University of Iowa's College of Public Health has just been published. The results cast into doubt the mantra that transmission of avian influenza virus to humans is difficult and uncommon.
Graduate student Kendall Myers in Gray's team studied the blood sera obtained from…
revere | June 3, 2007Pediatric Grand Rounds, a form of blog carnival for medical and health blogging, is now up over at Awesome Mom's site. Lots of good stuff and even something from EM linked there. If you are interested in children's health or pediatrics or just science in service of the community, stop by. Here's the link: http://awesomemom.blogspot.com/2007/06/pediatric-grand-rounds-24.html
revere | June 3, 2007What do we know about transmission of tuberculosis on an airplane? Not much, apparently. There is very little literature on it and not a single case of active TB has ever been traced to an airplane contact. On the other hand, it isn't very easy to estimate the risks. The only way you can do it is in cases such as the current one where you know someone with TB got on an airplane and potentially exposed others. Then you would do intensive follow-up of fellow passengers and crew to see if you could find others who might have gotten infected. Now the problems really start.
First, there's the task…
revere | June 3, 2007The Economist, a right of center journal of news and opinion I find quite interesting (as do many other lefties), has noticed that atheism is big in the book market. Comparing Hitchen's book, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything with Francis Collins's The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief they come up with a rather bizarre conclusion: whether you are a rationalist like Hitchens who comes up on the side of atheism or a scientist/rationalist like Collins who cleaves to the devout depends on whether you "have an intrinsic feeling for religion or not." Errr…
revere | June 2, 2007I'm going to defend the poor guy who flew on a commercial airliner against CDC advice. The one now in the National Jewish Hospital in Denver being treated for XDR-TB. Someone has to, so it might as well be me. He made a big mistake and the consequences are catastrophic for him and his family. Unlike lots of catastrophic mistakes, however, probably few others will be hurt by it. That's for another post. If it was a big mistake, why defend him?
I'll blame it on my mother. Like all mothers, she tried to teach me a lot of stuff, some of which was pretty useless or wrong, some of which was nice…
revere | June 1, 2007The world's five decade influenza surveillance system can be added as more collateral damage to George W. Bush's Global War on Everybody he Doesn't Like:
Anti-US sentiment contributed to Indonesia's success in leading developing countries to push the U.N. health body into agreeing to change a 50-year-old influenza virus-sharing system, the health minister said.
Iran, Iraq, Cuba, North Korea, Bolivia and Myanmar were among the 23 countries supporting Indonesia's argument that the existing system of unconditional sample-sharing was unfair to poorer nations, because they could not afford…
revere | June 1, 2007We know that the burden of mortality of seasonal influenza falls mainly on the older population but also can kill children and infants. In 2004 CDC started the Influenza-Associated Pediatric Mortality Surveillance System, itself part of a larger notifiable disease system. Its aim was to find out more about the pattern of influenza deaths in children. It is now bearing fruit. A recent surprise was the subject of a CDC Health Advisory, its middle level of broadcast health alerts:
From October 1, 2006 through May 7, 2007, 55 deaths from influenza in children have been reported to CDC from 23…
revere | May 31, 2007I'm not a lawyer and I don't play one on TV. But I think I know the difference between quarantine and isolation, and the widespread media reports that the Georgia resident with XDR-TB was the first person "quarantined" by the US government since 1963 didn't make sense. Quarantine means to segregate and possibly confine people who have been exposed to a contagious disease and therefore may become infectious themselves and spread it to others. But they are not sick. People who are segregated from the public and whose movement is restricted are under isolation, not quarantine. The Georgia…
revere | May 31, 2007Readers here who try to get their neighbors to prep and run into a stone wall aren't alone.
It's tough to convince people they need to be prepared for disasters. It's even harder when they don't believe that the scenario you envision will ever happen.
Nevertheless, local governments in Hall County and throughout Georgia are putting together plans for dealing with an influenza pandemic.
They don't have a choice. (Gainesville Times)
This Gainesville is the one in Georgia, not Florida, and they have no choice because Georgia's Governor, one Sonny Perdue, told them they had to. Governor Perdue is…
revere | May 30, 2007My wiki partner and fellow blogger Melanie Mattson (Just a Bump in the Beltway) alerted me to a whole new pile of crap about Bush's new Surgeon General nominee, James Holsinger, cardiologist and master of biblical studies (Melanie took me to task for saying that's a degree in "theology." I stand chastised. Errr . . . maybe that's not the right word. Errr . . . maybe it is.) We covered some of it in yesterday's post (wingnut homophobia and bigotry and generous campaign contributions to Bush and the Republican Party). But we missed some other stuff (you thought what we did write was enough?…
revere | May 30, 2007It was only last week we posted about XDR-TB. Yesterday CDC warned passengers on two international flights -- Air France 385, Atlanta to Paris on May 12 and Czech Air 104, Prague to Canada on May 24 -- they may have been infected by another passenger who had Extensively Drug Resistant TB (XDR-TB). Reportedly authorities could not reveal which row the male passenger sat in as this would violate medical confidentiality laws (HIPAA). So anyone on the plane could think themselves at risk, although it was probably only those in the same row and several rows front and aft of the passenger who were…
revere | May 29, 2007It's not as if the Surgeon General was such an important post. The SG's mission is mainly to educate the public and advise the President. No big deal, really. And in fact the past SGs might as well have been invisible. Hell, they were invisible. No use of the position as a bully pulpit to educate the public about good health. Now President Bush has nominated a new Surgeon General to replace the Acting SG who replaced the previous one who did almost nothing his whole tenure except issue a report on the dangers of second hand smoke and shortly thereafter found his appointment not renewed. So…