revere | January 13, 2007OK, folks. Voting ends tomorrow night, January 14 at midnight PST. We're doing pretty well, although everyone in both the categories we were nominated in is being crushed by the NHS Blog. Still we wouldn't mind coming in second or third, so if you have an inclination, give us your vote.
Voting is easy. The good folks over at Medgadget have established these awards for the best of the medical blogosphere and we were nominated for Best Medical Weblog 2006 and Best Health Policies/Ethics Weblog 2006. There are some truly outstanding blogs in the various categories, including several of my…
revere | January 13, 2007There's bird flu in Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, China, Nigeria, Egypt. You can read about that stuff anywhere. But it's Saturday, so you'll get this, my apology to Homeland Security. Because good manners are always timely.
I confess I've been openly skeptical about the efficacy of the requirement to remove my shoes at airport screening stations. Shoe bombs? Gels? Give me a break, I thought. It's no wonder Richard Reid didn't succeed. It's almost impossible to pull this off.
But then I found this AP story:
In 2006, U.S. agents increased their seizures of counterfeit goods by 83 percent,…
revere | January 12, 2007Two kinds of good news for anyone interested in safeguarding the public's health. Let's divide it between the message and the messenger.
The message: The National Research Council (one of the four constituent parts of the National Academies of Science) just issued a major smackdown of one of the Bush Administration's pet projects, the assault on any regulation that might harm the corporate status quo. The specific policy given a blunt thumbs down by the NRC was the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) of the White House Office of Management and Budget's bulletin to establish…
revere | January 12, 2007There once was a nice tidy story about why avian influenza viruses infected birds and human influenza viruses infected humans and pigs were the "mixing vessel" that brought them together so they could reassort their genetic innards. It went something like this. The avian virus can only attach to and thus infect cells that have a specific kind of receptor on their surface. The receptor was a terminal sialic acid with a particular linkage to the underlying cellular glycoprotein (for more on this see our four part primer on glycoproteins beginning here). For birds the linkage was designated α2,…
revere | January 11, 2007Missouri's nickname is the "The Show Me State." If you live anywhere near the state capital in Jefferson City, it isn't too late to be shown an exhibit in the Capitol Rotunda on "The Industry of Death." Today and tomorrow.
In it you will learn:
Twenty-five percent of psychiatrists sexually abuse their patients. Psychiatrists deliberately kill about 10,000 people a year - sounds about right. And for the big surprise, psychiatrists were responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks - guilty by association, at least, since psychiatrists are responsible for the existence of terrorists and suicide…
revere | January 11, 2007Reader K (hat tip) sent along the link to a New Yorker cartoon which seems the ideal accompaniment to this small squib from the MSN financial column, Ahead of the Bell: Bird Flu:
NEW YORK (AP) - Bird flu concerns swooped back into the news Wednesday, bringing companies trying to find treatments for the deadly virus back into focus.
The H5N1 bird flu virus typically spreads during traditional flu season as temperatures drop in winter months. The virus is transmitted mostly among birds, but has transferred to humans who are in close contact with them, and health officials fear the H5N1 strain…
revere | January 11, 2007From yesterday's Jakarta Post:
No extraordinary measures against bird flu this year
JAKARTA (JP): Coordinating Minister for Social Welfare Aburizal Bakrie said Wednesday the government would not take any extraordinary measures against bird flu this year.
Aburizal said the current measures were sufficient to contain the spreading of bird flu in the country.
"We have been applauded by international agencies for our measures to handle the bird flu in the country," he said in a press conference.
A-14-year-old boy died in a hospital in Jakarta on Wednesday after being confirmed to be infected with…
revere | January 10, 2007I am powerfully affected by music. I've sung in countless demonstrations, concerts, benefits over the decades and through all those years, We Shall Overcome has been perhaps the most powerful anthem in the many struggles against affronts to dignity and the battle against hopelessness. It rang through the black churches of the Depression years, the labor picket lines of the forties, the lunch counters in the civil rights years in the fifties, the streets during the anti-war movement of the sixties and so many other struggles, on through to today. Mostly I've sung it in the streets, in churches…
revere | January 10, 2007Yesterday Canada's Campbell commission released its report on the 2003 SARS outbreak in Toronto. SARS is most infectious in the latter part of its disease course, so it isn't surprising that 45% of the victims were health care workers. Two nurses and a doctor died. SARS was a deadly occupational disease.
In the 1200 plus page report, Judge Campbell and his colleagues place the blame on a broken health care system but find no individuals at fault. The Toronto Globe and Mail is disappointed. My initial reaction was irritation they saw a need for scapegoats, but as I read the column by Murray…
revere | January 9, 2007If you are old enough to remember the War in Vietnam, you remember escalation. If you missed it, you'll get George Bush's version tomorrow night. So what could be more appropriate than to bring back the classic song about escalation, Pete Seeger's Waist Deep in the Big Muddy. Click here to see Pete perform it. Lyrics follow, below the fold:
/p?
Waist Deep In The Big Muddy
by Pete Seeger 1963, planned for the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in 1967 but CBS objected to the blacklisted Seeger making obvious references to the"big fool" in the White House, finally sung by Seeger on the Comedy Hour…
revere | January 9, 2007I just returned from our University bird flu task force. We aren't ready. We aren't even close. The good news is that we know we aren't ready and we know we aren't even close. At least we're worried. This isn't some penny ante crowd of mid level managers, either. These are the top dogs at one of the biggest private universities in the country. They take it seriously. But it's tough. Our community is larger than many small cities but not as self sufficient. But if it's the planning and not the plan, we've made progress, because we're meeting regularly although we still don't have a plan.
That…
revere | January 8, 2007We have a lap dog. She is bred to be a companion to people and she excels at it. We were going to name her "EPA" after her function (lapdog), but chose a more human name instead. After all, she's a dog. Despite the fact that she doesn't get much exercise, she isn't fat. But obesity is a problem for dogs, too, it seems. So a drug for obesity in dogs is a potential ATM. Nobody sees an ATM like Big Pharma. And their lapdog, the FDA.
A drug specifically designed to treat canine obesity has been approved for the first time by the US Food and Drug Administration.
The drug's developer, New York-…
revere | January 8, 2007The major H5N1 news over the weekend was the new Indonesian case, their first confirmed human case of 2007. The major H5N1 news of the end of the year was the absence of any human cases in Vietnam. The Indon case has been well covered on the newswires. It's a 14 year old boy, hospitalized on New Year's Day. He is said to have had contact with a dead duck. On the other hand, they always say something like that in Indonesia. Their previous case was five weeks earlier. But it's winter and flu season. Expect more.
Now, Vietnam. First, after no reported outbreaks in poultry for over a year, the…
revere | January 7, 2007The vexing problem of when to close schools in the event of an influenza pandemic and who will do it seems to be, well, still vexing. A brief communication in CDC's journal Emerging Infectious Diseases by Princeton's Laura Kahn makes clear the level of vagueness, if not confusion surrounding it in the US:
The US Department of Health and Human Services' checklist regarding school closures gives conflicting messages. For example, it recommends that schools stay open during a pandemic and develop school-based surveillance systems for absenteeism of students and sick-leave policies for staff and…
revere | January 7, 2007My curiosity over the epistemology of complaints about alternative medical claims aside, I have no doubt that there is a ton of quackery out there. Some is easy to identify (magnetic bracelets, etc.), some is officially sanctioned (health claims for vitamins, various over the counter pharmaceuticals sold by Big Pharma, etc.) and some of it is sacrosanct. Literally. Now in Ohio a televangelist is being sued for the false claim that she and her husband could cure illnesses like cancer with prayer. Or rather that God can. They are just channeling God, I guess. Which is supposed to make it OK.…
revere | January 6, 2007My post on "Why are manhole covers round" was made in all innocence. I'm interested in sewers and long ago someone had mentioned this little factoid to me and I thought it was interesting. Little did I know.
Little did I know, what? First, that this is a notorious question. Allegedly it came to notoriety because this was a question asked by Microsoft on job interviews. In addition it is supposedly a Mensa question (couldn't find the cite) and some companies claim to have used it before Microsoft (McKinsey & Co).
Wikipedia has a good entry on manholes with 11 good reasons they are round (…
revere | January 5, 2007Effect Measure is pleased to say we have been nominated in two categories for a Medblog award. The good folks over at Medgadget have established these awards for the best of the medical blogosphere and we were nominated for Best Medical Weblog 2006 and Best Health Policies/Ethics Weblog 2006. There are some truly outstanding blogs in the various categories, including several of my SciBlings (Respectful Insolence, Aetiology, The Examining Room of Dr. Charles, and GrrlScientist (now renamed Living the Scientific Life (Scientist, Interrupted)).
Voting for your favorite blog is an easy way to…
revere | January 5, 2007Since I started cogitating on the apparent dominance of H1 subtypes this flu season instead of the more common H3, I've continued to look at some previous papers on the subject. The take home message I am getting is that there is quite a bit we don't know about this disease, influenza, despite its long history and the interest of the medical and scientific community. We've commented on this before. Some problems are like that. Cancer is another example. A particularly interesting paper that illustrates the point by Hay et al. was published in 2002 (hat tip to a loyal reader who sent the link…
revere | January 4, 2007I have what some might think is an unhealthy interest in sewers. It's not really unhealthy, because, as I never tire of telling Mrs. R., I'm only interesting in theoretical sewerology, not the kind where I might actually visit a sewer (I tell her this whenever she wants me to do some plumbing repair in the house. I leave that to her. I prefer electricity. Truth to tell, I have actually taken a boat through the Paris sewers and visited a sewage treatment plant, but those were aberrations). I once edited a book that reprinted important papers and documents in 19th century sewer history. I…
revere | January 4, 2007One of the unanswered questions about the transmission of influenza H5N1 is the mode. We presume, probably correctly, that person to person spread is the main mode, mediated by coughing, breathing, sneezing. Whether the infective material is small enough to remain suspended in the air for long periods or whether it is primarily in large droplets that settle out quickly is a matter of importance still under debate but both possibilities pertain to person to person spread via the respiratory tract. Then there is the question of the role of inanimate objects, like door knobs, arm rests or…