revere | January 3, 2007Mercury is a neurotoxin. Neurotoxins are bad for developing nervous systems. Therefore . . .
Five "hotspots" of mercury contamination posing a risk to human health have been found in the eastern states of the US and eastern provinces of Canada.
Average mercury concentrations in many of the region's freshwater fish exceeded the US Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) recommended level for safe consumption by up to 20 times.
[snip]
The EPA safety limit for the consumption of mercury is 0.3 parts per million, yet perch in some locations contained a concentration of about 5 parts per million…
revere | January 3, 2007The other day we observed that through week 51 of 2006 (two weeks ago) flu activity in the US looked about "normal" except for the dominance among subtyped isolates of H1 influenza instead of the more usual H3. I began to wonder how common or uncommon this was and have done a little digging, but haven't found all the information I am looking for yet concerning the relative dominance of H3 versus H1 in the years since 1977, which is when H1 made its reappearance. Data on CDC's flu activity website regarding subtypes only goes back to 2000 - 2001 (at last that I could find), and that is also…
revere | January 2, 20072006, like other years, was a year of revenge killings. Iraq is the poster child for the cycle of violence and counter-violence that seems to have no end but exhaustion of the combatants. But it isn't the only one. The death sentences in the notorious case of the Tripoli 6 and the execution of Saddam Hussein are two more.
We have dealt here depressingly often with the Tripoli 6 case, the health workers from Bulgaria and Palestine convicted in a Libyan court of intentionally infecting over 400 children with HIV. The exclusion of vital scientific evidence that the virus was almost certainly a…
revere | January 2, 2007Crawford Kilian at the H5N1 blog makes the pertinent observation that the reports of suspected human bird flu in Vietnam have gone into a kind of limbo. He refers to it as "information inertia" because the same reports of the four suspect cases (and possibly two more) have been co-circulating for days with a single Agence France Presse report that further testing on four of the cases are negative. Both reports appear essentially unchanged on successive dates. Crawford speculates it may be related to short staffing over the holidays failing to catch up with the latest news the cases are not…
revere | January 1, 2007Everybody should think of starting a new career once in a while, and New Year's Day seems as good a time as any for US taxpayers to embark on their new jobs as Venture Capitalists. Medgadget, a site that brings us news of advances in medical technology, now tells us about a private Salt Lake City company, TechniScan Medical Systems, who just received $2.8 million in taxpayer money, from NIH no less, to develop a noninvasive ultrasound device for detecting breast cancer.
Medgadget is offended by the use of public dollars for this purpose, and frankly, so am I. NIH supports basic research and…
revere | January 1, 2007The Reveres get a lot of emails from folks who think their issue is worthy of mention on Effect Measure. For the most part, they are right, and the only reason for not mentioning them is the time and attention span of The Reveres. One of the privileges of blogging is the blogger gets to set the agenda. Periodically I get emails from someone who feels very passionately about the harm being done to military personnel by mandatory anthrax vaccination. I've even blogged about it on occasion (on the old site, here, here, here and here), and I think there are some serious public health issues…
revere | December 31, 2006What looked like probable human H5N1 in Vietnam with four cases in one family (a mother and three children), may not be, although the circumstances are sufficiently suspicious we prefer to suspend judgment a bit longer before concluding that this was a false alarm. False negatives and false positives occur. In some senses, though it doesn't matter much. The virus continues to be found in poultry in more and more places in Vietnam, with 73% of poultry samples in the central province of Qung Nam reported positive. These developments are probably a combination of endemic virus, infected poultry…
revere | December 31, 2006According to wingnut whacko James Pinkerton, nut case columnist for Newsday, at least one war is going well, these days: the war against The War on Christmas:
So Christmas has survived yet another year.
Yes, there has been a war on Christmas, fought by a few lefty lawyers who managed to buffalo some multiculturalist bureaucrats and politicians. But it's been a losing war:
First, and most obviously, there's the steadfast religiosity of the American people; polls routinely show that 90 percent of Americans believe in God. Secular progressives have done their best to knock the faith out of…
revere | December 30, 2006Indonesia and Nigeria have a couple of things in common. One is bird flu.
So far, both countries have a stubborn endemic infestation of the virus in their poultry, and neither has been successful in bringing it under control. Indonesia also has the distinction of more human fatalities from bird flu than any other nation, by far: 57 deaths. The closest runner-up is Vietnam with 42.
Not to worry. Indonesia will have this dire situation under control by this time next year:
Indonesia, which has the world's highest bird flu death toll, plans to ramp up its fight against the virus and hopes to…
revere | December 29, 2006Gerald Ford, 38th President of the United States and the only one not to be elected as either President of Vice President, isn't even in the ground yet but some of him is being resurrected. Over at Gristmill Dave Roberts has an excellent piece on Ford's 1975 State of the Union speech (complete with a long excerpt of the relevant part) where the former President worried over the country's loss of energy independence.
In it he noted that America's surplus oil -- and its attendant ability to stabilize world oil prices and prevent the emergence of a petroleum cartel -- had vanished in 1970; we…
revere | December 29, 2006The third of the recently diagnosed H5N1 cases in Egypt has now died, bringing that country's total to 18 cases with 10 deaths, the largest outside asia, southeast asia or Indonesia. The case count for 2006 now shows more cases (114) and more deaths (79) than any previous year. And the virus was more deadly, at last measured by a case fatality ratio (deaths divided by total confirmed cases). Indeed the number of deaths in 2006 exceeded the total of deaths for 2003, 2004 and 2005 combined (79 versus 78), although the number of cases exceeded last year's by only 18%, compared to an 88% increase…
revere | December 28, 2006I'm not sure why I'm bothering to say this -- again -- but it always seems to be necessary. The horrific oil pipeline explosion in Nigeria that took over 260 lives is now being treated as a possible focus of epidemic disease because of the decaying bodies. Dead bodies in mass casualties do not cause disease, no matter how many times we see reports like this:
Nigerian health officials are disinfecting the site of an oil pipeline explosion that killed more than 260 people and injured dozens more.
Fumigation work began on Tuesday night, according to health officials.
"Our concern is to prevent…
revere | December 28, 2006Like Indonesia, the Philippines is an archipelago, comprising some 7000 islands of varying size. It is also close to Indonesia, which lies just to the south across the Sulu Sea. Indonesia has more bird flu deaths than any country in the world and the disease is endemic in poultry all over that huge country. But so far, The Philippines has reported no H5N1 in poultry or humans. The fact that The Philippines has reported no bird flu is remarkable. Maybe too remarkable.
Here's the map indicating the human cases in Indonesia, as kept up to date by a cadre of dedicated FluWikians, here. The…
revere | December 27, 2006I don't ordinarily write about health care reform here, partly because it isn't my expertise, partly because other interests come first, partly because others do it much better. But I have been thinking a good deal about what needs to be done for our public health infrastructure and that necessarily brings health care reform into the picture, whether I want it there or not. My view of it is primarily as a consumer. I pay ridiculous health insurance premiums and still feel underinsured. But I also see it from the provider's point of view, where the current system, while lucrative for some, is…
revere | December 27, 2006Somethings you don't have to keep saying and others bear repeating. This is one that bears repeating because most of us would rather believe we are making progress on combatting avian influenza.
The exemplar in the fight was Vietnam, the country still with the most confirmed human cases (Indonesia has the most deaths), but also a country that registered no new cases, human or poultry, since a year ago November (some isolated cases of stork infection were reported in August). Vietnam's supposed success was attributed to a vigorous program of vaccinating birds and banning live markets in Hanoi…
revere | December 26, 2006Our SciBling Matt Nisbet over at Framing Science has called our attention to a WaPo piece about Governor Arnold (The Terminator) Schwarzenegger's emergence as one of the most pro-environment state-house chiefs in the nation. The fact that he runs the biggest state with enormous economic clout makes it all the more significant. Reading the WaPo article Matt points to makes clear he has also picked up on a significant aspect of The Governator's strategy which got by the WaPo staff writer but we believe is significant. As Matt sees, Schwarzenegger is framing is arguments in public health terms.…
revere | December 26, 2006It is an unconscious assumption of many public health officials, experts and most health educators that The Truth Shall Make you Free. We know it won't, not even in something as simple as understanding what to do and not do about bird flu. A paper this month in CDC's scientific journal, Emerging Infectious Diseases, is a case in point. Public health workers at the Pasteur Institute in Cambodia, the London School of Hygiene, the Cambodian Ministry of Agriculture and the UN's FAO undertook a survey about the knowledge, attitudes and practices among rural villagers in Cambodia, a southeast asian…
revere | December 25, 2006Measles is now uncommon in the US, thanks to vaccination. Last year there were only 66 cases. But half of them came from a single, unvaccinated 17 year old who traveled to Romania on a church mission that visited an orphanage. The next day she returned to the US and attended a gathering of other church members, 33 from Indiana and one from Illinois. Three wound up in the hospital.
Measles vaccination is not 100% effective but it is estimated to be over 90% in pre-school and school aged children. In this instance, 32 of the 34 cases were unvaccinated:
"The outbreak occurred because measles was…
revere | December 25, 2006The trouble with the influenza A/H5N1 virus is that it's a virus and doesn't know it's Christmas and time to take a break. It doesn't know anything because it doesn't think or know or believe or want anything. It just makes copies of itself and that can be done anytime it and a suitable copy machine (aka a competent host) are in the same place. Apparently they were in the same place in Egypt over the last week or so.
Egypt has detected a third new case of the H5N1 bird flu virus, just hours after confirming two new cases in a brother and sister, a World Health Organisation official said…
revere | December 24, 2006[This is a very long post, a reply to Orac's (my respected SciBling at Respectful Insolence) equally long response to my also long original post that invited him to tell us what he thought separated his brand of medicine from the "alties" he frequently posts about. Probably most of you won't have the patience to wade through this. But a challenge is a challenge and must be met. Anyway, its Christmas Eve. Who's reading, anyway?]
I had to smile at Orac's response to my "bit of a pot shot" across his bow with my chicken soup provocation, because that's what it was, a deliberate provocation. And…