revere | March 27, 2007[A series of posts explaining a paper on the mathematical modeling of the spread of antiviral resistance. Links to other posts in the series by clicking tags, "Math model series" or "Antiviral model series" under Categories, left sidebar. Preliminary post here. Table of contents at end of this post.]
We are now almost through with the mathematical part of the model in the paper, "Antiviral resistance and the control of pandemic influenza," by Lipsitch et al., published in PLoS Medicine (once Methods section is done, we will examine the Results, which are not mathematical but epidemiological…
revere | March 27, 2007Indonesia, as usual, presents us with a dilemma. It is one of the least effective nations in dealing with their bird flu problem, exhibiting massive incompetence spiced by corruption. This has helped make them the bird flu epicenter of the world, with more deaths (by a long way) than any other nation and fast approaching Vietnam for most number of recorded cases. At the same time they have raised a legitimate issue: developing nations like Indonesia provide essential information to WHO on how to make effective vaccines against circulating influenza virus strains. WHO in turn shares the…
revere | March 26, 2007[A series of posts explaining a paper on the mathematical modeling of the spread of antiviral resistance. Links to other posts in the series by clicking tags, "Math model series" or "Antiviral model series" under Categories, left sidebar. Preliminary post here. Table of contents at end of this post.]
We continue our examination of the paper, "Antiviral resistance and the control of pandemic influenza," by Lipsitch et al., published in PLoS Medicine. We have gotten to the point where our population is divided into five categories. We follow the course of the epidemic on each of its days by…
revere | March 26, 2007[Oh, my. Thanks to my readers at CIDRAP (tip of the hat!) I have become aware the story linked below on masks is an old one, something Crof at H5N1 calls a ghost story. The NewsNow aggregator I use has been doing this a lot lately, so I have been alert, but in this case I had it in my head there was a new mask report and I didn't check the date carefully. Everything I said in the post is still true, but it isn't new. In fact I said much the same thing when it first came out -- a year ago! Anyway, my apologies to readers. I hate to make mistakes like this.]
The National Academies os Science'…
revere | March 25, 2007[A series of posts explaining a paper on the mathematical modeling of the spread of antiviral resistance. Links to other posts in the series by clicking tags, "Math model series" or "Antiviral model series" under Categories, left sidebar. Preliminary post here. Table of contents at end of this post.]
In this post we begin our look at the mathematical part of the model in the paper, "Antiviral resistance and the control of pandemic influenza," by Lipsitch et al., published in PLoS Medicine. The main model is presented in the first four paragraphs of the Methods section.
The Model: view from 50…
revere | March 25, 2007My flu wiki partner, fellow blogger and friend Melanie of Just a Bump in the Beltway fame sent me an email on Friday with subject line: The Times They are a Changin'. In the email was a summary of findings from a recent survey of Trends in Political Values and Core Attitudes: 1987-2007 by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. Pew has been doing these surveys periodically and they present a picture of shifting attitudes on "values" issues. They now show a welcome return to earlier, more moderate views on helping our fellow citizens, a less friendly attitude toward the use of…
revere | March 24, 2007[A series of posts explaining a paper on the mathematical modeling of the spread of antiviral resistance. Links to other posts in the series by clicking tags, "Math model series" or "Antiviral model series" under Categories, left sidebar. Preliminary post here. Table of contents at end of this post.]
The Modeling Series (click Math Modeling Series under Categories in the left sidebar) is a moving target for me. Even though the first draft of the post you read each day was written at least three weeks earlier, each has also been freshly worked on as I go back and tinker and adjust and try to…
revere | March 24, 2007[A series of posts explaining a paper on the mathematical modeling of the spread of antiviral resistance. Links to other posts in the series by clicking tags, "Math model series" or "Antiviral model series" under Categories, left sidebar. Preliminary post here. Table of contents at end of this post.]
We are almost ready to begin a detailed examination of the mathematical model presented in the paper, "Antiviral resistance and the control of pandemic influenza," by Lipsitch et al., published in PLoS Medicine. The main model is presented in the first four paragraphs of the Methods.
Some…
revere | March 23, 2007Pregnant Latina women in the Salinas Valley in CAlifornia have pesticides in their bodies. The surrounding farmland is loaded with pesticides. But how is it getting from the land to them? Or is it? Tom McKone and his colleagues at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs set out to find out. It turned out not to be that easy.
McKone and company concentrated on organophosphate pesticides (OPs). These are long acting nerve poisons for pests but can also affect humans and are of concern for neurodevelopmental effects on fetuses and children. When taken into the body they are metabolized to other…
revere | March 23, 2007[A series of posts explaining a paper on the mathematical modeling of the spread of antiviral resistance. Links to other posts in the series by clicking tags, "Math model series" or "Antiviral model series" under Categories, left sidebar. Preliminary post here. Table of contents at end of this post.]
As promised, this post will start a detailed examination of the paper by Lipsitch et al., "Antiviral resistance and the control of pandemic influenza," published in PLoS Medicine, section by section. We hope you have your own copy, available here (see previous post for more details). We'll start…
revere | March 22, 2007AP is carrying a distressing story that CDC is working with General Motors' OnStar service to speed provision of emergency responders to serious car accidents. What's distressing about it? My immediate reaction, which I believe is irrational but was natural and spontaneous: Now they'll know where everyone is all the time. Big Brother. It's distressing because of what it says about my attitude toward this government: I don't trust them. At all. I don't believe they have my interests at heart. Even more distressing is that many of you will think that's a perfectly normal and natural -- and…
revere | March 22, 2007[A series of posts explaining a paper on the mathematical modeling of the spread of antiviral resistance. Links to other posts in the series by clicking tags, "Math model series" or "Antiviral model series" under Categories, left sidebar. Preliminary post here. Table of contents at end of this post.]
In this post we start to dig into a mathematical model of antiviral resistance in influenza. The modern era of mathematical modeling started early in the last century with attempts to understand malaria spread, almost exactly 100 years ago. For the first 50 of those years scientists used pure…
revere | March 21, 2007Indonesia has still to provide the WHO flu surveillance program with any H5N1 viral isolates since the first of the year. The issue is access to what will certainly be a scarce vaccine supply if a pandemic would start in the next five or or even ten years. The leading candidate for a pandemic strain at the moment is one that starts in Indonesia, the world's current hotspot for avian influenza both in poultry and people. So controlling access of vaccine makers to H5N1 isolate from within its borders recognizes they have something the rich countries that have the vaccine plants need. One reason…
revere | March 21, 2007[A series of posts explaining a paper on the mathematical modeling of the spread of antiviral resistance. Links to other posts in the series by clicking tags, "Math model series" or "Antiviral model series" under Categories, left sidebar. Preliminary post here. Table of contents at end of this post.]
The use of antiviral drugs to prevent or manage a pandemic with influenza/H5N1 is both a mainstay of national and international pandemic plans and a source of controversy. Will there ever be sufficient doses to make a difference? If there were, could they be deployed and administered in time? If…
revere | March 20, 2007This is definitely a good news public health story. So why do I have that nagging feeling that in a year or two or a five we might be reporting it as one with unintended consequences?
I hope not. Here it is:
Mosquitoes genetically engineered to resist infection with a malaria parasite outbreed their normal cousins and might be used to help control malaria, U.S. researchers said on Monday.
They said their study suggests that releasing such genetically altered insects could help battle malaria, which kills up to 3 million people a year around the globe, most of them small children.
Marcelo…
revere | March 20, 2007Tomorrow we begin a blog experiment, one we already judge has failed. In January Marc Lipsitch and his team at the Harvard School of Public Health published a splendid paper using a mathematical model to investigate the spread of antiviral resistance in the control of pandemic influenza. When we read it our first thought was to write a substantial blog post about the results. The paper was published in PLoS Medicine almost the same week as another mathematical model on spread through the air traffic system by Colizza et al. and the Colizza paper seemed to get most of the newswire notice. But…
revere | March 19, 2007In the old days doctors traded clinical pearls and experience face to face at medical meetings. With the internet and online publication we sometimes forget how important those personal information exchanges can be and often still are. Canadian Press's Helen Branswell (still the world's best flu reporter) now tells us that about 100 doctors with the most experience actually treating H5N1 infections will be meeting this week in southern Turkey to swap experiences:
Doctors who have treated H5N1 avian flu patients are meeting in a Turkish seaside town to try to find answers to the myriad…
revere | March 19, 2007Anniversaries may be artificial milestones marking a distance on a road from the past, but they also remind us of where we are now: enmired in the fifth year of a hideous and vicious war, a war whose disastrous consequences were foreseen by many but disregarded by a compliant press and credulous public. No one -- no politician or citizen -- should be able to say they were deceived. They allowed themselves to be deceived. Almost a quarter of the US Senate voted against the use of force resolution, without benefit of hindsight. Many of you understood, too. We started it, anyway. We should end…
revere | March 18, 2007Vaccine reactions are almost inevitable, and even when rare, if you are vaccinating hundreds of thousands or millions or tens of millions, you get them. Some are worse than others, and generalized vaccinia from a smallpox vaccination is one of the worst. Vaccinia is cowpox, not smallpox, but since Jenner first discovered that milkmaids who had localized cowpox lesions then didn't get smallpox, infection with this live virus has been used to protect us against smallpox. Except we don't need to be protected anymore, because the last smallpox case died in 1978, ironically on September 11. The…
revere | March 18, 2007The big news in the world of atheism this week is the admission by northern California congressman Pete Stark that he was a nontheist. In officially making his declaration of non faith, Stark has breached what many think of as the last religious taboo in American politics.
Mr Stark, who has served in Congress since 1973, admitted his "non-theism" after the Secular Coalition for America, an advocacy group in Washington, offered a $1,000 bounty to the person who could identify the "highest-level atheist, agnostic, humanist or any other kind of non-theist currently holding elected public office…