WHO
gregladen | October 27, 2015See what I did there?
As you know, the UN WHO International Agency for Research on Cancer has listed Red Meat as Group 2A (probably carcinogenic to humans) and processed meat at Group 1 (causes cancer).
And everyone is upset. The most common reaction to these listings is to criticize WHO. The least common reaction to these listings is to learn what the listings are, what they mean, what they mean to you, to the meat industry, to cancer research, and all that. Here, I will try to provide some perspective on some of this.
WHO is probably more likely to list something as cancer causing
It is…
oracknows | March 23, 2015There are some antivaccine lies that just never die. Well, actually, most of them are very much like Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers, and Freddy Krueger in that, just when you think you've killed them at the end of the latest confrontation, they always come back. Always. As an example of this, let's go back four months ago. Remember back in November when I discussed a particularly pernicious antivaccine lie that's been spread by Kenyan Catholic Bishops and the Kenya Catholic Doctors Association? It was the claim that the tetanus vaccine used to prevent neonatal tetanus in young women in Kenya…
milhayser | August 14, 2014As an unprecedented outbreak of Ebola crosses borders in West Africa, people are asking new questions about the virus and its potential to turn into a global pandemic (hint: it's not gonna happen). Greg Laden writes "The disease is too hot to not burn itself out, and it has no human reservoir. Ebola accidentally broke into the human population earlier this year or late last year." The current numbers from the WHO suggest 1800 confirmed and suspected cases of Ebola so far with a mortality rate edging down toward 55%.
Last week some in the U.S. objected to bringing two American patients back…
cmonforton | December 13, 2011[Update 12/15/11 below]
It's been 3 1/2 years since Leah Nielsen lost her father from mesothelioma. "I took care of my father as he died an excruciating death. He died too young." This Utah resident wants to protect others from suffering the same kind of horrible death by banning the use and export of asbestos.
Pennsylania resident Barbara Mozuch feels the same way: "My mother died on June 18, 2011 from peritoneal mesothelioma, just seven weeks after being diagnosed!! Something needs to be done."
Heidi von Palleske of Ontario, Canada explains how asbestos ruined the health and took…
lborkowski | April 7, 2011Today is World Health Day, and the World Health Organization is using the occasion to draw attention to a serious global health problem: the rapid spread of bacteria resistant to antibiotics. The development and widespread use of antibiotics counts as a public health triumph, as infections that once routinely killed large numbers of people became much easier to treat. That triumph can be undone, though. WHO Director-General Margaret Chan warns, "In the absence of urgent corrective and protective actions, the world is heading towards a post-antibiotic era, in which many common infections will…
dblum | June 20, 2010
During the 1970s, international aid agencies came up with a brilliant plan to stem a plague of water-borne illnesses in the Asian country of Bangladesh. They would underwrite the installation of wells in disease-troubled villages, tapping into the cleaner ground water below.
They would use simple, relatively inexpensive tube wells, place thousands of these over-sized drinking straws into the shallow aquifers. And these straws - millions of them - would suck up the cleaner, microorganism free water in healthy abundance.
At first, it seemed to work like a blessing. Infant mortality…
stoat | February 4, 2010Well, he is this one. But not this one. In the news, he is Former IPCC Leader Says Climategate Scientists "Manipulated data." and the "head of the International Technical Review Panel for IPCC's first report".
The latter is what interests me. What is it? I am just about old enough to remember IPCC '90, and indeed I have a paper copy, WG I of course, provided free of charge by the nice Hadley folk. I should have got them to autograph it. In it I find no mention of the said panel. There was the WG I core team co-ordination, who were at the Hadley, but what is the panel? A search of www.ipcc.ch…
revere | January 28, 2010The Reveres have written many posts about the World Health Organization in five years. Some just reported on their activities, others, as seemed appropriate, were critical or praised them. WHO operates in a difficult landscape under rules of engagement not well suited to fighting an enemy that recognizes neither national borders nor national sovereignties and one might question this intergovernmental agency's relevance given those constraints. But we have always bridled at accusations WHO acted unethically or incompetently, neither of which is true. WHO does a difficult job with just a…
revere | January 13, 2010The finger pointing and the told-you-so-ers are out in force these days and WHO seems to be one of their targets. In the face of wealthy European countries cutting their swine flu vaccine orders because of limited demand, critics are claiming that WHO exaggerated the threat in league with or under the influence of Big Pharma vaccine makers out to make a killing. This is really two issues. One, did WHO appropriately appraise the risk; and two, were they unduly influenced by greedy drug makers. I think the answer to these questions are "Yes" and "No."
In our view WHO was caught between a rock…
revere | December 7, 2009Any concerns about the current swine flu vaccine inevitably bring up the swine flu episode of 1976. This is not 1976. For starters, this year we have a bona fide pandemic and in 1976 the virus never got out of Fort Dix, NJ. That in itself is a game changer. If there are any risks from a vaccine (and there are usually some risks, even though they are much safer than most over the counter drugs) and they are for a disease no one is at risk for, the risk - benefit equation has nothing on one side and if there is anything, no matter how rare, on the other, it makes it unfavorable for the vaccine…
revere | November 23, 2009The US has ordered 250 million doses of swine flu vaccine, mainly from foreign manufacturers. That's a large proportion of the world's productive capacity. A couple of the biggest vaccine makers, Glaxo-SmithKline (GSK) and Sanofi Pasteur, have promised to make donations to WHO for use in the poorer countries and with some smaller donations that's maybe 160 million doses. Countries like the US that earlier had pledged 10% of their supply have yet to do so, and given the political problems of sending overseas vaccine when there's not enough for US citizens, well, good luck with that. So at best…
revere | November 16, 2009We were asked repeatedly offline and in the comments for our views on what was or was not going on in the Ukraine, but we steadfastly declined to post on it. We didn't know any more than you can find out from news sources, so we had nothing to add in the way of hard information, We did know there was a WHO team on the ground and we thought it best to wait to find out more. We still don't know much, except that news reports are suggesting that the health care system in the Ukraine is a shambles and its likely the chaos and panic were self-inflicted more than virally inflicted. Mike Coston over…
revere | November 6, 2009Helen Branswell, the Canadian Press's extraordinary flu reporter, is one of the few reporters who could have written the article, "Flu dogma being rewritten by a strange virus no one pegged to trigger a pandemic". She's been following flu for years and has watched as one thing after another we thought we knew about flu has been shown wrong -- by the flu virus. It's a theme we have been sounding as well for almost as long. As scientists we've seen one alleged flu truism after another was stood on its head. A couple of years ago we began to assume anything said about flu was provisional. Some…
revere | September 14, 2009They say starting the day with a good breakfast gives you a leg up on the rest of the day, so we thought we'd start out the week with some decent public health news. We're always bringing you bad public health news, which isn't what we want to do. We live for the news to be good. That's what we work for. So here's some good news. Well, I'd call it good news and bad news:
UNICEF today released new figures that show the rate of deaths of children under five years of age continued to decline in 2008.
The data shows a 28 per cent decline in the under-five mortality rate, from 90 deaths per 1000…
ddobbs | September 2, 2009On the radar of late:
Neuroskeptic ponders reports that antidepressant use in the U.S. has doubled in the last decade. As he notes, perhaps the most troubling thing finding in the study is that
the number of Americans using an antipsychotic as well as an antidepressant increased by a factor of more than 3. This is, frankly, extremely troubling, since antipsychotics are by far the worst psychiatric drugs in terms of side effects. There is evidence that some antipsychotics can be of use in depression as an add-on to antidepressants, but there is better evidence for other alternatives, such as…
revere | September 1, 2009It's not Labor Day yet, but I guess the Reveres have to consider their vacation over. We're all back at our respective home stations. We admit that not watching flu evolve daily was a relief, although we did sneak peeks when we weren't supposed to. But it also proved to be like the stock market. The daily ups and downs sometimes obscure the bigger picture. So what does it look like now?
We have two contradictory impressions. One is that the pandemic has continued to develop in a very robust fashion. So it's a dynamic picture of change. The second is that it looks like a normal pandemic, just…
revere | June 11, 2009WHO today declared we an influenza pandemic is underway (aka, phase 6), which is not news to anyone. This beast has been barreling long for at least 3 or 4 weeks and the reluctance to call it what it was was related to resistance from some of WHO's member states (the UK, China and Japan have been often fingered as the chief culprits). The apparent lack of cases in Europe didn't fool most experts. The EU was using a testing protocol designed to minimize the case count. It was refreshing not to have the US party to these kinds of shenanigans, but of course we had no opportunity: it started here…
revere | June 10, 2009Listening to yesterday's press briefing with WHO's Dr. Keiji Fukuda (audio file here), several things seemed clear to me. The first is that everyone, WHO included, thinks a pandemic is well underway. Second, WHO's efforts to explain why they are not making it "official" by going to phase 6 are becoming increasingly awkward and the explanations manifestly tortured. Essentially what Fukuda said was that WHO was waiting for its member nations to signal they knew it was a pandemic and then WHO would say it was a pandemic. It was reminiscent of the cries of one of the principals of the…
revere | June 6, 2009CDC is reporting about 14,000 confirmed or probable cases of swine flu, although they have already said this may represent only a fraction of the total number of infected. I wasn't able to find the latest number of those hospitalized (some of you probably have it but I couldn't locate it with a quick search), but my recollection is that it is somewhere around 300. That puts the hospitalization rate at around 2% of the confirmed/probable cases (I round figures liberally because they are too uncertain to worry about precision). 2% is the same number the Chilean health authorities are using for…
sciencepunk | June 4, 2009
On June 6, a group of deluded and dangerous people will meet to discuss how their brand of magic can heal the sick in developing countries. The Homeopathy for Developing Countries Conference in
Amersfoort, Netherlands will bring together quacks and misguided "healers" to immerse themselves in solipsistic self-congratulation whilst promoting a mysticism that could spell death for hundreds of the world's poorest people, if not more. They say:
Some homeopaths have even decided to permanently live in Africa or another region where medical help is scarce. These people do wonderful work because…