revere | January 24, 2007Bird flu is a disease of birds, so how are the birds doing this year? If you just read the headlines, you might be a bit confused. Unfortunately reading the stories won't clear things up:
Many global bird flu outbreaks unreported -FAO
Many countries are doing a better job fighting the H5N1 bird flu virus, yet many outbreaks are not reported, Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) officials said on Tuesday.
[snip]
"So far, many countries have managed to progressively control the virus and the global situation has improved tremendously," Juan Lubroth, a senior FAO infectious diseases official…
revere | January 23, 2007The University of California Regents (their Board of Trustees) is facing a thorny issue: should researchers in the University of California system be banned from taking research support from the tobacco industry? Two conflicting imperatives, one, unfettered freedom to pursue research wherever it leads; the other, the need for some constraints. Not anything goes, even in the hallowed halls of higher learning. Let me be clear. I think the chief executives of tobacco companies are aiding and abetting, if not committing, homicide, by promoting an addiction to a fatal product for money. I favor…
revere | January 23, 2007Dr. Margaret Chan has been on the job at WHO for about a month. So far so good. Two weeks ago she named Dr. Anarfi Asamoa-Baah as WHO's Deputy-Director General. I don't know him, myself, but those who do (and whose judgment I trust) have nothing but the highest praise for him, describing him as "brilliant." This is generally thought of as a wise and effective move. One appointment doesn't make a successful tenure, but I'd rather be giving provisional approval than complaining about something.
Dr. Chan's statements on bird flu, while not startling, are at least accurate. Monday she addressed…
revere | January 22, 2007Tomorrow we will be "treated" to the annual State of the Union lie-fest, with Liar-in-Chief George W. Bush reportedly to tell us we need a massive commitment to ethanol to break our oil addiction. Ethanol is the oil man's methadone, it seems. It doesn't sound like we'll be hearing about conservation, mass transit or other alternative energy sources (although maybe we'll hear about the oxymoron, "clean coal"). Mr. Bush is an oil man from Texas, and in Texas they know what's good for Global Warming.
They are good for global warming. As in the new 18 lane highway they are building to take the…
revere | January 22, 2007A little noticed paper in CDC's Emerging Infectious Diseases takes us back to a year ago when dead and dying birds infected with H5N1 were first found near water in Germany, Slovenia and Austria. In mid February 2006 a sick swan picked up from a river in Austria was taken to an animal shelter in Graz. It died a day later. While there it infected 13 of 38 other birds (swans, ducks and chickens), detected 3 days later. That day the poultry area of the shelter was disinfected after the birds were removed.
But the animal shelter had more than birds:
In the same shelter were 194 cats; most had…
revere | January 21, 2007Half of us in the US now live in cities, towns or states that ban smoking in public places, including restaurants and bars (it's nice to be more enlightened than Europe in at least a few things):
Seven states and 116 communities enacted tough smoke-free laws last year, bringing the total number to 22 states and 577 municipalities, according to the group. Nevada's ban, which went into effect Dec. 8, increased the total U.S. population covered by any type of smokefree law to 50.2 percent.
It was the most successful year for anti-smoking advocates in the U.S., said Frick, and advocates are now…
revere | January 21, 2007When newspaper columnist Art Buchwald died on Wednesday I had to laugh. Forgive me if this shocks you, but he always made me laugh, even when he died. In an interview on PBS's Newshour, Jeffrey Brown played a video of Buchwald reading the first sentence he would write if he were to write his obituary in The New York Times. Looking straight into the camera, with a twinkle in his eye, he says, "I'm Art Buchwald and I died today." I laughed.
Buchwald developed kidney failure in December of 2005 and elected not to have dialysis, instead entering a hospice to die on his own terms, and then, when…
revere | January 20, 2007Reading the comments here can be both exhilarating and dismaying. The peevishness I see about WHO falls into the dismaying category. People who follow bird flu have a tendency to get crotchety with WHO over some of its more flagrant gaffes and obvious attempts at spinning, although which way the spin goes isn't always clear. But WHO does a lot with a little, a budget less than that of some major American hospitals. We've been (we think appropriately) critical of WHO here, but it is an agency that also has done, and continues to do, a powerful amount of good in this world. The recent…
revere | January 19, 2007Brought to you bereft of comment:
Source: New York Times, January 17, 2007 (h/t Attack Rate)
revere | January 19, 2007The news that H5N1 viruses isolated from an uncle and niece in Egypt who died in December has been found to carry a genetic change suggestive of resistance to the main antiviral drug oseltamivir (Tamiflu) headlined the H5N1 newswires yesterday. Specifically, WHO announced that genetic sequencing had found the N294S change in the isolates (explanation below the fold). It is not clear at the moment whether the change occurred during treatment of the pair with the drug or the virus carried the change when it infected them. It is also not clear what the clinical significance of the change is. We…
revere | January 18, 2007As a frequent traveler I am all for measures to keep me safe. Someday maybe I'll see some at the airport. While I dutifully stand in line with the other sheep, taking off my shoes, emptying my pockets, taking my laptop out of my briefcase and putting it in a separate tray (why?), taking my jacket off, etc., etc., anybody with half a brain and the intention to do it can sneak on a plane. How do I know? Consider this career criminal who wanted to get from Washington state to Dallas, Texas.
He stole a car and led police on a wild ride at speeds of over 90 miles an hour, finally blowing the…
revere | January 18, 2007It may not be the most comforting headline, but it certainly is of interest to flu watchers: Rebuilt 1918 Flu Infects Monkeys, May Assist Research (John Lauerman, Bloomberg). It's also a pretty accurate headline. Nice to see. So what's it all about?
Most people who come here know that the 1918 "Spanish flu" virus has been reconstituted, using information frm fragments of the viral genetic material dug up from frozen corpses in Alaska, Siberia and pathology samples kept in archives. Once the entire sequence was pieced together the actual genetic material could be constructed and allowed to…
revere | January 17, 2007If you are an abstainer, you can abstain from this post. Likewise if you are svelte and always struggling to keep your weight up. For the rest of us, the University of Rochester has an interesting compilation of the caloric value (and alcohol content) of about 50 brands of beer, domestic and imported, and another table on wines (hat tip MedGadget).
Some interesting factoids:
Commonly misattributed to excess alcohol calories being stored as fat, the "beer belly" is actually a result of alcohol's more complex effects on the body's metabolic system. Simply put, alcohol reduces the amount of…
revere | January 17, 2007Two news reports in recent days added another dimension to the already worrisome seasonal resurgence of H5N1. First, there is little doubt that the current spate of human cases is just what we expect to see at this time of year, based on past experience. This doesn't mean that the increase is "just" seasonal, however. It can easily be masking or being accompanied by a change in the virus that makes this year different than last year, just as perhaps previous years were different than the ones before. To say this is a the usual seasonal resurgence is more descriptive than explanatory. It is…
revere | January 16, 2007It almost got by us, but we noticed it just in time. Nominations for the 2006 Koufax Awards are now open over at Wampum. For those on the Port (left) side of the blogosphere, the Koufax Awards are the most important credit we can obtain. We have been nominated all of our blog years and were a Finalist last year (SciBling PZ at Pharyngula won the Best Expert Blog and our friend Jordan Barab at Confined Space won the Best Single Issue Blog, both richly deserved), but we did well and we are always pleased to be in such good company. We have a real chance this year, because there will be no…
revere | January 16, 2007It's January and once again the bird flu news is unsettling. Reports from Indonesia suggest a new cluster there and one of the isolation wards to be used for suspected bird flu cases is reported to be overwhelmed, although the small number of beds in these facilities doesn't mean huge numbers. Enough to be concerned, though. Another story says that the virus is prevalent in feral cats in Indonesia. That has yet to be confirmed. Besides the list we noted yesterday, Thailand is now reporting a poultry outbreak. Given all this, I continue to be cautious about how to interpret the January bad…
revere | January 15, 2007Today is a holiday in the United States. It commemorates Martin Luther King, Jr., a martyr of the American struggle for civil rights. But there were many more. During the "Freedom Summer" of 1964 three civil rights workers, James Chaney a 21 year old black man from Mississippi and Andrew goodman and Michael Schwerner, two white youths from New York, aged 20 and 24, were murdered in Mississippi:
The murders of the three men occurred in Philadelphia, Mississippi, on June 21, 1964, just one day after the trio had arrived in Mississippi. The men had just finished a week-long training at the Miami…
revere | January 15, 2007Michael Fumento is piqued because nobody paid any attention to his ludicrous and childish dare to us, DemFromCT at DailyKos and Tim Lambert and MadMike here at SciBlogs:
Okay guys, put your bucks where your blogs are! Ten to one odds for each of you; each gets to pick the amount in question. I say the year 2008 will roll around and there will be plenty of terrible problems in the world, but pandemic avian flu won't be among them. Naturally some of these anti-scientists have insinuated that somebody must be paying me to say pandemic avian flu is a bunch of bird droppings -- that's also how the…
revere | January 14, 2007Six days ago when commenting on the first human case in Indonesia for 6 weeks, we noted that flu season was upon us and to expect more. That's seems to be the way it is working. The virus continues to spread in poultry in Vietnam and outbreaks have been confirmed in Nigeria, Japan and South Korea. The new year also saw human cases in Korea and one in December in China and three in Egypt. Now Indonesia seems to be reporting them almost daily, four in the last week. There is talk of a cluster, there. So what's going on?
There are two main possibilities, neither of them good but one much worse…
revere | January 14, 2007The arguments over atheism are getting pretty raucous. It's not coming just from the religious right. It's also on the secular left (examples here and here, or here on Science blogs here and here). Apparently there is supposed to be a new kind of atheist, the fundamentalist atheist: intolerant, rigid and deliberately offensive to the many gentlefolk believers that certainly exist. The two biggest targets for this charge are Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins. Daniel Dennett is getting off easy and the new book (Atheist Manifesto: The Case Against Christianity, Judaism, and Islam ) by Michel…