outbreaks

"I also understand that parents need to have some measure of choice as well. So that’s a balance the government has to decide.” -- NJ Governor Chris Christie, February 2, 2015 "The state doesn't own the children. Parents own the children, and it is an issue of freedom." -- Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), February 2, 2015 Longtime readers know that I lived in central New Jersey for eight and a half years before taking an opportunity to return to my hometown just under seven years ago. Having spent the better part of a decade there, I think I understand New Jersey, at last the northern and…
Dr. Robert Sears has to be one of the most irresponsible pediatricians on the face of the earth, if not the most irresponsible. Many of you might recall that a little more than a week ago "Dr. Bob" posted a borderline unhinged rant on Facebook aimed at his own patients, who, quite reasonably, were calling him about the measles outbreak going on in southern California right now and asking him about the measles vaccine. It was entitled Measles Epidemic . . . NOT!, and his response boiled down to, in essence, "get the vaccine if you're worried, but there's no real reason to worry." He also…
With plumes of crude oil destroying the Gulf of Mexico, tensions rising in the middle east, a severe hurricane season reving up in the Atlantic, and the earth opening up and just plain swallowing parts of Guatemala City whole, what else could possibly go wrong? A mormon cricket crosses the road, Nevada. Well. How about a plague of locusts?* The USDA has just announced that the conditions are ripe for a grasshopper outbreak in the northern great plains: The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) is expecting potentially heavy grasshopper outbreaks…