revere | March 7, 2007Let me apologize in advance. This is a bit of a rant about scientific writing. It didn't start out that way, but as I hit the keyboard, Satan took control.
A new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS, or "penis" in the trade) is said to be reporting that bird flu comes from southern China (Wallace et al., "A statistical phylogeogrpahy of influenza A H5N1," PNAS, March 13, 2007, 104:4473-4478). We already knew that. So what's new? That's a bit harder to say.
Here's the lede (i.e., the opening lines of a news story) from the Agence France Presse news agency:
US…
revere | March 6, 2007The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) is the only one of the NIH institutes whose mission clearly has public health at its core. At least it was the only one. Now there are none, thanks to the narrow vision and autocratic management of its Bush appointed Director, Dr. David Schwartz. In the two years he has been at the helm we have seen morale plummet, emphasis change from public health and toward clinical medicine and a variety of scandals plague what was once the proudest and most public spirited member of the NIH family.
Schwartz, like other Bush appointees, has a…
revere | March 6, 2007While finishing drafting a series of posts on how Tamiflu resistant virus might spread as a result of intense use for influenza control, Melanie at Just a Bump in the Beltway posted this to remind us that drug resistant organisms spread for reasons much less useful than trying to stop people from dying. Like treating cows so they can be killed later and we can eat them and make money for agribusiness:
The government is on track to approve a new antibiotic to treat a pneumonia-like disease in cattle, despite warnings from health groups and a majority of the agency's own expert advisers that…
revere | March 5, 2007The mainstream media (MSM) have covered the disgraceful treatment of US Iraq War veterans by the Army's Walter Reed Medical Center quite well and it has resulted in the firing of the medical center's commmander and the forced resignation of the Secretary of the Army, its civilian head. But before either of them sent down the tubes, the first to go was one William Winkenwerder, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs (ASD/HA), last heard of in this space as the Pentagon's Chief Medical Bully. Good riddance.
Why was Winkenwerder the first to go? Here are his official responsibilities…
revere | March 5, 2007If the best you can say about the human bird flu vaccine made by Big Pharma's Sanofi Aventis SA is that it is "better than nothing," are you even correct about that?
The Food and Drug Administration is considering a recommendation from an outside panel of expert advisers that it approve the Sanofi vaccine. Those experts endorsed the vaccine's safety and efficacy Feb. 27, but with a caveat: that it's only the first step in developing a way of successfully immunizing humans against the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu.
Sanofi said it recognizes the vaccine is only an interim solution, since…
revere | March 4, 2007In December some people were wondering what had happened to bird flu. In January it came back, but there was hope it wouldn't be as bad as last year and that some of the control measures were working. Now February is behind us and we are seeing resignation in some quarters that we haven't made as much progress as we'd hoped:
Bird flu is on the march again across Asia as winter ends, but the battle against the killer virus is being hobbled by stark differences between the region's diverse countries, health experts warn.
While Vietnam and Thailand have been hailed as poster adverts in the fight…
revere | March 4, 2007Since I am a professor I know better than most that professors can say stupid things (feel free to interpret that as self-referential paradox). My example du jour is Paul Campos, a law professor at the University of Colorado. In a nonsensical Commentary published by the Scripps Howard newspaper chain, he tries to make the case there are almost no genuine atheists. That's why Americans are so intolerant of atheists (I guess in his view it's not really intolerance, because there aren't really any atheists). He specifically mentions polls showing that a lack of religious belief is a…
revere | March 3, 2007When Indonesia withdrew from the longstanding system whereby countries shared influenza virus with WHO there was widespread consternation in the public health community. The sharing system has been used for many years to determine the candidate strains for the following year's vaccine. The regular seasonal flu vaccine has three components corresponding to the prediction of which of the influenza A H1N1, H3N2 and influenza B strains will be circulating during the next flu season. Usually the guess is correct, although sometimes it misses. In any event, global surveillance of circulating virus…
revere | March 2, 2007My SciBling Mike the Mad Biologist, who is an expert on antibiotic resistance, has an interesting post about an "epidemic" of commensal E. coli. It seems (if I understand his post correctly) that there is not the genetic range of E. coli lineages in humans as in animals. About 20% of our gut E. coli comes from one of three clones. There is no apparent reason for this as the E. coli don't seem to have any features that make one better off than another. I have nothing to add to the basic observation, but I thought I'd use it to review some elementary microbiology, since we talk a lot about…
revere | March 2, 2007If the number of emails I've gotten about the new "market" in pandemic risk were buy orders, I'd be doing very well. A market in pandemic risk? Of course. Is this a great country, or what?
Is a bird flu pandemic coming? Health experts say there is no way to know, and especially no way to know when.
But someone does know, or, rather, the combined experience of a lot of someones -- doctors and nurses treating the odd human patient, microbiologists studying virus samples and virus experts studying disease patterns.
A new "market" launched on Thursday aims to take advantage of this combined…
revere | March 1, 2007The new public health site, The Pump Handle (TPH), continues to produce top notch posts. The latest is by David Michaels, Professor and Associate Chairman in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health, the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services (and former Assistant Secretary for Heath at the Department of Energy in the Clinton administration). It's about the dietary supplement industry, or as I prefer to call it, the quackery in a capsule biz. One of their favorite products is the anti-oxidant cancer preventative scam. There is quite a body of…
revere | March 1, 2007In the 1918 pandemic deaths occurred either from the usual secondary bacterial infections or the rapidly advancing acute respiratory distress syndrome. The latter, at least, seems also characteristic of the current human cases of H5N1, and in both the 1918 virus and the contemporary H5N1 there is strong evidence that a dysregulated immune system resulting in a "cytokine storm" may be involved (see our brief description of cytokine storm at The Flu Wiki). But what are the details of a cytokine storm and how does the virus cause it? A new paper in the Journal of Virology on an entirely…
revere | February 28, 2007When I started talking about this with friends and colleagues several months ago they thought I was quite crazy. But then they've thought that for a long time. It's mainly a source of amusement. I hope. Anyway. What I was talking about is using the online virtual world, Second Life, for public health purposes. Second Life (SL) is a "3D online digital world imagined, created and owned by its residents." Over 1.3 million have logged on in the last 60 days. You participate by constructing a 3D representation of yourself called an avatar. If you are an old geezer like me, there is a pretty steep…
revere | February 28, 2007Sometimes my flu obsessed readers think no one is paying attention but it isn't true. Beneath the surface of a spasmodically and superficially interested mainstream media, various institutions are worrying and grappling with the enormity of the consequences of a pandemic. Colleges and universities have the special problem of large and dense communities of mobile and active young adults, the ones in the cross-hairs of the current pandemic candidate, influenza A/H5N1. Many, probably most, colleges and universities have not done much. But a significant number have. The University of Minnesota is…
revere | February 27, 2007A follow up (of sorts) to yesterday's post on the "new" strategy for preventing foodborne illness at the US Department of Agriculture. This one's about the new policy at the Food and Drug Administration:
The federal agency that's been front and center in warning the public about tainted spinach and contaminated peanut butter is conducting just half the food safety inspections it did three years ago.
The cuts by the Food and Drug Administration come despite a barrage of high-profile food recalls.
"We have a food safety crisis on the horizon," said Michael Doyle, director of the Center for Food…
revere | February 27, 2007The bird flu news hasn't been that good this week. New outbreaks in Afghanistan, Kuwait, Vietnam's previously quiet north, continuing infestations in Russia, and human cases in Egypt and Laos (although confusion over the Egyptian case) (see rundown in CEDRAP News here and here). How about some good news? Like, tests have shown the experimental vaccine now being considered for licensing by the FDA is safe. Of course there is also other news about the vaccine:
The federal government is weighing approval of a bird flu vaccine that is even less effective than previously thought.
Sanofi Aventis SA…
revere | February 26, 2007I must really be losing it, because I just can't seem to understand the latest announcements from the the Food Safety Inspection Service (FSIS), a regulatory division of the US Department of Agriculture. I've read it a bunch of times and I still don't understand it. I'm not saying it's bad (whatever it is). I just wonder what it is. Enough about my confusion. Let's see if you are confused, too.
The set-up is pretty easy. We've had a spate of food safety problems, the latest being a multistate outbreak of Salmonella traced to commercial peanut butter (Peter Pan and generic brands sold in high…
revere | February 26, 2007An official at the new Stockholm-based European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) is complaining about the flood of information about emerging diseases produced by the internet:
"A few years ago people were predicting that the internet and new technologies such as automated media scanning would make this task easier," said Denis Coulombier, head of the ECDC's Preparedness and Response unit, in a statement.
"In fact, almost the reverse has happened," he added.
"Epidemic intelligence officers in Europe are often so flooded with information that the 'spam' and 'background noise'…
revere | February 25, 2007Table top exercises are supposed to be realistic. I've taken part in them and I can tell you they are. So it's not surprising this realism, often including simulated notices and documents, can combine with the speed of information dissemination of the internet in ways that are, well, not surprising:
UNICEF and the Maldivian government are today reassuring people that reports of a bird flu outbreak in the Maldives are untrue.
The reports were spread after documents forming part of a UNICEF simulation training exercise were doctored and leaked by a third party. A document detailing the…
revere | February 25, 2007I've said before I quite like Christmas as a secular holiday. I might be an atheist, but I like the sense of generosity, the urging (albeit with commercial motives) to do something nice for those we care about and those we don't know, the emphasis on Peace on Earth and Goodwill towards All. Too bad we can't do that more than just at Christmas. Unfortunately, this is not what I had in mind:
Imagine if the religious right's beloved "war on Christmas" was a year-round affair. Legions of lawyers ready to pounce on school and civic administrators, the persistent neon buzz of ACLU-paranoia in the…