revere | February 3, 2007CDC held a full scale bird flu drill yesterday and allowed reporters to watch (h/t ch). After some reported what they saw, one wonders if they will do it again. Not that they finished the drill, which was stopped halfway because Atlanta had an ice storm. I hope this doesn't happen during a real emergency. An emergency like this one:
⢠A 22-year-old Georgetown University student who visited his family in Indonesia returned to the United States. He became seriously ill the next day and went to a Washington, D.C. hospital. Lab tests confirmed he had the bird flu that's been killing people in…
revere | February 2, 2007I'm sure you've read about this on other blogs (what? you read other blogs?), but it is just too juicy and too emblematic not to comment on here. Well, I won't actually comment on it. It is self-parodying:
Indonesia claimed a major victory in the fight against bird flu Thursday, saying the heart of the capital had been cleared of backyard fowl and that residents elsewhere were handing in chickens for slaughter.
But poultry could still be seen roaming freely in suburban neighborhoods and some people hid pet birds in their homes, raising doubts the campaign would prevent further human deaths in…
revere | February 2, 2007If H5N1 is going to "go pandemic" it has to be transmissible from person to person. This occurs, but rarely. Why? The 1918 virus was not only lethal but easily transmissible. What's the difference between the 1918 pandemic strain and all the H5N1 strains we've seen so far?
One of the theories was that H5N1 didn't transmit readily because it didn't infect readily, and the explanation for that was that the avian versions hooked on to cellular receptors that are readily accessible in birds but not in humans. We've discussed the underlying science frequently (here [first in five part series, with…
revere | February 1, 2007Most readers probably never gave much thought to tissue culture, the laboratory technique where cells or tissues are grown in flasks or other containers separated from the organism of origin. One of the reasons for doing this is to grow viruses, since a virus needs a host cell to replicate. It can't "live" on its own and doesn't grow in size. It just makes a copy of itself. Dog kidney cancer cells, for example, are used to grow influenza virus in flasks that also contain nutrient medium for the dog cells. Finding the right tissue culture system for a virus is an art in itself. For many…
revere | February 1, 2007It's flu season. Human flu, that is. Also, it seems, flu in poultry. So if someone comes down with high fever, aches and pains and a cough in an area where there is H5N1 in poultry, is it likely to be bird flu? The answer, so far, is "No." The reason is fairly straightforward, although this is counter-intuitive for many. First, the empirical evidence (from Thailand), then the explanation.
Nearly half of the patients on the bird-flu watch list have, in fact, caught human influenza, the Medical Sciences Department (MSD) disclosed yesterday.
Since bird-flu infections among fowls were detected…
revere | January 31, 2007Lecturers, even at a university like Harvard, are pretty far down the food chain. Even if, like Linda Bilmes an economist at Harvard's Kennedy School, you were once an Assistant Secretary of Commerce in the Clinton Administration and co-authored a paper recently with a Nobel Laureate economist. Lecturers are the kind of vulnerable faculty a call to their Dean might harm. At least the Pentagon seemed to think so, because after chewing her out over the phone they called her Dean to complain about a "pretty dry" paper she gave at the Allied Social Sciences Association meeting in Chicago. Maybe…
revere | January 31, 2007Our Wiki partner DemFromCT has this post at DailyKos this morning about a CDC media phone conference/advisory tomorrow on its new Public Service Announcements (PSA) on pandemic flu and its guidelines on community measures that can be taken in the absence of a vaccine. This is the kind of ratcheting up some will see as a new an ominous development, but that's not my view. Instead I see it as the kind of thing that should to be done well in advance of anything happening, whether it happens or not. It is just good, routine public health practice.
We still need to see what these PSAs and…
revere | January 31, 2007Exploration with new vaccine technologies is moving forward rapidly, although given the usual pace of the science and then necessary tests for safety and efficacy it isn't likely we will have a bird flu vaccine sooner than two or three years from now. Maybe that's enough time. Maybe it isn't. It would have been good if we'd have started earlier, but we didn't. Anyway, here's the latest entry, a skin patch vaccination (TransDermalImmunization, TDI). Naturally the news comes to us not through a scientific publication but through a press release. How else do you raise money these days? (That's a…
revere | January 30, 2007Many Americans were outraged when they learned the fur collar on their new made-in-China coat was really cat fur or dog fur. I guess the outrage at the sacrifice of what we know as a companion animal (aka pet) for clothing is understandable. If we kept mink or fox as pets it might elicit the same reaction. The fact that birds are common household pets in other parts of the world but not in North America or Europe seems to make it all right to cull them by the millions in a bird flu outbreak, but I've carried on about this sensitivity/insensitivity issue before and how it depends on whose pet…
revere | January 30, 2007I am going through the latest mathematical model papers on the spread of influenza on the air travel network and another on antiviral resistance, both published last week in PLoS Medicine. It's taking me a while. They are not instant reads and I am busy at work. The air travel paper by Colizza et al. sent me back to the authors' previous papers for additional details and then I wanted to sort out the many tiny errors that inevitably creep into long technical papers (the antiviral paper by Lipsitch et al. remarkably had only one, a wrong subscript). So a fuller post is for another day, and…
revere | January 29, 2007Having spent several posts on the science behind Polonium-210 (here, here, here), we thought we'd bring you a follow up on the case to date. The murder weapon seems to be a pot of tea. How very English:
British officials say police have cracked the murder-by-poison case of former spy Alexander Litvinenko, including the discovery of a "hot" teapot at London's Millennium Hotel with an off-the-charts reading for Polonium-210, the radioactive material used in the killing.
A senior official tells ABC News the "hot" teapot remained in use at the hotel for several weeks after Litvinenko's death…
revere | January 29, 2007Having taken on the American Chemical Society the other day, why stop there. Let's talk about the American Chemistry Council, the ACC (neé the Manufacturing Chemists' Association, then the Chemical Manufacturers Association and now ACC). And bird flu. Yes, bird flu. The ACC is a trade association of the largest chemical companies and has a division called the Chlorine Chemistry Division which has just launched a website "dedicated to educating the public on flu prevention and recovery." If you believe that I've got a 1995 Volvo with low mileage (for a Volvo) just for you. Only driven at the…
revere | January 28, 2007Yesterday we took note of the mirror image of absenteeism, presenteeism. The concern here is that people will show up to work sick and if they are infectious, spread influenza or whatever else is going around. As we noted people have various reasons for working sick, not the least of which is that they cannot afford to "waste" a sick day in case they need the few they have for family emergencies (like a sick child) or simply because they don't have paid sick leave and need the money. Almost half of US workers are in that position. So various proposals have been made to require paid sick leave…
revere | January 28, 2007Let's identify the enemy correctly. In a democracy, the enemy is cynicism. All enemies of democracy want you to be cynical about whether you can affect anything your government does. Cynicism is deeply anti-democratic. Even on a day where we gathered by tens or hundreds of thousands to tell our political leaders they must stop the madness and they are deaf. On such a day, especially, cynicism is the enemy.
CNN's (pathetic) coverage of yesterday's large visit to Washington, DC by antiwar lobbyists (why are we protesters but Halliburton's pro-war profiteers are lobbyists?) lasted a few hours on…
revere | January 27, 2007Whenever the topic of sick leave comes up, employers are quick to raise the specter of malingering to get out of work. But a recent report on CNN suggests that showing up when sick may be costing plenty, too. "Presenteeism" is not just a financial problem but a public health one particularly germane to influenza:
Practically every workplace has one - the employee who comes to the job aching, coughing and sneezing.
So-called "presenteeism," or going to work when sick, is a persistent problem at more than half of U.S. workplaces and costs U.S. business a whopping $180 billion a year, research…
revere | January 26, 2007When three separate people send you an article in Nature it gets your attention. Since I have a paid subscription to Nature, my attention was ready to be grabbed anyway, but I hadn't yet read this story so a tip of the hat to my informants. I also have paid personal subscriptions to Science and a number of other journals. I am not opposed to subscriptions for journals. But the story is about how some big scientific publishing houses have gotten together and hired a notorious PR hit man to battle Open Access publishing, apparently by any means necessary, whether intellectually honest or not. I…
revere | January 26, 2007It seems like just yesterday the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization was saying that the current resurgence of bird flu is not as bad as last year when it burst out of Asia and extended itself into 40 countries or so. It wasn't yesterday. It was Monday. Enough time for that judgment to look a wee bit premature.
In fairness, FAO cautioned everyone not to let down their guard. Good advice, especially as the first poultry outbreak in Europe this season has now been confirmed in Hungary and the virus has returned to Japan for the first time in three years. We aren't even mentioning China and…
revere | January 25, 2007Stories like this really interest me, so a special thanks to Jody Lanard who sent it along. It's about those gloves they wear while making you a sandwich at the deli or a fast food joint. You know the ones. The disposable plastic kind. Disposable so you can change them often and throw them away. The kind that prevent the hands of the person behind the counter making direct contact with the food. Those gloves.
From the Journal of Food Protection Volume 68, Number 1 p. 187-190, a paper by Lynch et al.:
A study was conducted to determine whether the levels of selected microorganisms differed on…
revere | January 25, 2007We spend a lot of time on bird flu here because, as I have explained, it is a useful lens through which to look at the void in public health leadership as well as preparedness issues of the system that allegedly protects us from bird flu and much else. We don't spend all this time on bird flu because we believe it is the most important public health problem in the world. It could become so, but it isn't now. Our view is that if it ever does, we should be ready for it, and it takes leadership for that to happen. But there are other gigantic problems, too, and we want to highlight one of them…
revere | January 24, 2007Tonight The Reveres are putting on their party clothes and headed for Jordan Barab's place, Confined Space. Doors open from 9:00 pm to 11:00 pm, Eastern Standard Time.
Truthfully, this party is also a wake, because Jordan is closing up shop tonight and has invited everyone over (that means you, too) to celebrate his last post. We'll be gathering in the Comment Thread. That's the bad news. Here's the good news.
Jordan is closing the blog because he has a new job on Capitol Hill (for the non-Americans, that's where our legislative branch is located), working for the Committee on Education and…