#swineflu
ddobbs | October 5, 2009Lots of flu news out there. Here's my short list for the day:
Helen Branswell reports that WHO is unpersuaded by the unpublished paper showing seasonal flu vaccine may raise chance of getting swine flu. (Anomalies are usually anomalies.) Canada has been thrown into quite a bit of confusion by this report, with some provinces holding off on seasonal flu vaccines.
Meanwhile, an OB notes an extraordinary death toll of H5N1 among pregnant women.
Greg Laden has an extremely short post suggesting how difficult these two bits of news are when you (or your wife) are actually pregnant. The gist: The…
ddobbs | October 2, 2009Been a while, so these cover a span of reading.
I'm in the midst of my friend Adrienne Mayor's The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome's Deadliest Enemy, and can report that Mr. M is quite a poisonous but complicated handful -- a dark and deadly echo of his hero and model, Alexander -- and this reconstruction a splendid read.
A few weeks ago I finished Thomas Ricks' The Gamble, an excellent account of the surge in Iraq. Ricks -- who earlier wrote Fiasco, a devastating indictment of the run-up to the war, makes three things quite clear:
The surge was not about more soldiers,…
ddobbs | April 27, 2009
"Swine Flu and the Mexico Mystery," my story on the swine-flu outbreak, is up at Slate. It looks at a question hotly pursued right now: Why does this flu seem to take a much deadlier course in Mexico than elsewhere so far? The answers will suggest much about what's to come.
Of the two two qualities vital to a nasty pandemicm-- to spread readily, and to be deadly, -- this flu,a brand-new strain of swine flu, or H1N1, seems to possess the first: Evidence is high that it spreads readily among humans. In that sense, it's an inversion of the bird flu. Bird flu terrifies infectious disease…