July 19, 2008
Category: Food
About a year and half ago, in a post entitled "One donut, black", I noted the claim of a food company that it would soon be able to sell donuts spiked with caffeine. I wasn't sure I would ever see such a thing, but I was too skeptical. Not only is that company still on track with its product, but another company has now announced its intention to put caffeine into bakery goods. All for our benefit, of course:
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Posted by revere at 7:50 AM • 7 Comments
July 18, 2008
Category: Health care
If you make a ranked list among developed nations on how well the US is doing in health care, we are towards the top of the list. If you hold the list upside down:
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Posted by revere at 7:06 AM • 30 Comments
July 17, 2008
Category: Words
Hand, Foot and Mouth Disease (HFMD, not to be confused with a disease of cattle, Foot and Mouth Disease) is the result of an infection by one of several intestinal viruses, the most common being Coxsackie A and Enterovirus 71 (Ev71). HFMD is a fairly common contagious infection of infants and children that often appears in outbreak form in schools and daycare centers. Children with HFMD have fever, sore throat and characteristic lesions around the mouth and in the throat. Recently some very sizable outbreaks caused by Ev71 have been reported in China, Singapore and Mongolia, with thousands of cases and scores of deaths. It made news headlines around the world and within China. Given the way news of disease outbreaks is handled in China, this isn't a given, unfortunately, but in this case the Chinese were quite aware of the outbreak and its cause (for more on the outbreak in East Asia, see the great eye witness account by Tara Smith over at Aetiology). That seems to be the explanation for the "braised enterovirus" on the menu of this Chinese restaurant (h/t reader gh):
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Posted by revere at 7:30 AM • 15 Comments
July 16, 2008
Category: Safety
A recent news article by Helen Branswell of Canadian Press ("Wait an hour to swim after eating? Says who?") contained two pieces of information, one that surprised me and one that didn't. Branswell was writing about the well worn safety advice to wait at least an hour after eating before going in swimming. This was a rule I remember as far back as I remember anything about what I was told about water safety. She points out that no one seems to know the basis of the alleged fact that to do otherwise courts the risk of developing muscle cramps that could lead to drowning. The theory, as I remember it, was that blood needed by your muscles was being diverted to your intestines for digestion. Not enough blood in the muscles led to cramps. Cramps while in water over your head might make it impossible to stay with your head above water. Etc.
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Posted by revere at 7:18 AM • 12 Comments
July 15, 2008
Category: Occupational health
What's a little sodium dichromate, anyway? So it's a known human carcinogen and can do a lot of other nasty things. No big deal. Not for Iraq war contractor, KBR, anyway. At the time KBR was a subsidiary of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld's Vice President Dick Cheney's former company, Halliburton. So when they were given a lucrative contract to clean up and safeguard Iraqi oilfields after the Bush Mission was Accomplished in 2003, they told the soldiers and workers that the chemical, used as an antirust agent and then strewn all over the oil facilities, was a "mild irritant." Later they admitted this wasn't exactly accurate, so the Army tested blood and urine of over a hundred of the workers for chromium. No problem:
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Posted by revere at 7:28 AM • 11 Comments
July 14, 2008
Category: CDC
CDC has discovered a new way a bird can cause bird flu: its own incompetence:
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Posted by revere at 7:05 AM • 25 Comments
July 13, 2008
Category: Anti-war
Cluster bombs are designed to do just one thing: kill people. It doesn't matter if the people are soldiers or not. In fact cluster bombs kill more civilians than they kill combatants. These diabolical weapons (I can't think of a better word) are not just one bomb but hundreds of little bomblets, each a small grenade, that scatter over a wide area and then explode. Or not. And that's the problem. Unexploded ordinance that later explode when disturbed by a farmer's plow, a child playing in the field or a family's valuable livestock. The civilized world wants to ban cluster bombs. The United States is not a part of the civilized world and opposes any ban on cluster bombs, as does Israel who used them two years ago in their invasion of Lebanon and reaped the justifiable condemnation of the civilized world. Which apparently doesn't include israel, either. The UN estimates there are 100,000 unexploded bomblets scattered around populated areas of south Levanon. In fact there are a fair number of rogue cluster bomb making nations besides Israel and the US, including Russia, Pakistan, China and India, none of whom can claim to represent civilized nations, either.
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Posted by revere at 3:30 PM • 27 Comments
Category: Freethinker Sermonettes
There are days when it is agony to read the news, because people are so goddamned stupid. Petty and stupid. Hateful and stupid. Just plain stupid. And nothing makes them stupider than religion. (Pharyngula)
And there are days when it is agony to have to defend a Scibling on the flimsy grounds that, well, he's right, isn't he? PZ Myers at Pharyngula has raised the predictable shit storm by expressing appropriate outrage at the Christian Taliban's (Florida division) attempt to ruin the life (and limb) of a University of Central Florida student who didn't let a communion wafer dissolve in his mouth but instead retrieved it, intact, outside the church. According to the ever reliable Fox News station in Florida (ever reliable as a purveyor of religious whacko nonsense), he wanted to show it to a friend:
Webster's friend, who didn't want to show his face, said he took the Eucharist, to show him what it meant to Catholics.
Webster gave the wafer back, but the Catholic League, a national watchdog organization for Catholic rights claims that is not enough.
"We don't know 100% what Mr. Cooks motivation was," said Susan Fani a spokesperson with the local Catholic diocese. "However, if anything were to qualify as a hate crime, to us this seems like this might be it." (Fox News, Orlando)
The Catholic League is not a national watchdog organization. It is a single vicious pitbull, Bill Donohue, who has made a career out of antisocial behavior towards anyone who suggests that not everything Donohue defines as "Catholic" is as pure as the driven snow. Yes, they do know what his motivation was. The Catholic League and the Catholic Church and their ilk don't care. They want to make another point: don't touch the hot stove.
I think these people made that point a couple of times before: to Salman Rushdie and to newspapers printing a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed.
Posted by revere at 7:40 AM • 18 Comments
July 12, 2008
Category: Bioterrorism
We've had occasion to discuss the boondoggle, Project Bioshield a number of times (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here). Maybe I should have said, quite a number of times. REally, though, it's hardly worth mentioning. Via the Clinician's Biosecurity Briefing, this:
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Posted by revere at 7:39 AM • 2 Comments
July 11, 2008
