Tara C. Smith
Associate Professor, lab rat (microbiologist/infectious disease epidemiologist) and occasional blogger, full-time nerd.
tsmith
Posts by this author
November 8, 2007
Both Mike and Revere have new posts up documenting swine as a new threat to human health (beyond the pork chops and bacon), via carriage of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus in these animals. Several papers have been published recently documenting high rates of MRSA carriage in swine…
November 7, 2007
_Paddy K_ hosts the "eighty twelfth" edition of Tangled Bank, proving once again that you can never go wrong when you combine partying + scientists + nerdy science bloggy goodness.
November 6, 2007
In our paper on HIV denial, Steven and I started the introduction off with a note about South African president Thabo Mbeki:
This denial was highlighted on an international level in 2000, when South African president Thabo Mbeki convened a group of panelists to discuss the cause of AIDS,…
November 6, 2007
I've written a post or two (or a dozen) discussing science journalism--the good, the bad, and, mostly (because they're the most fun), the ugly. There was this story about how blondes "evolved to win cavemen's hearts." Or this one that completely omitted the name of the pathogen they were…
November 5, 2007
I wrote about an emerging mosquito-borne virus with the strange name of chikungunya in a pair of posts last year. This is a virus that was first discovered more than 50 years ago, but as far as arthropod-borne viruses ("arboviruses") go, it's been a minor player for most of that time, as other…
November 4, 2007
Welcome to this month's edition of Pediatric Grand Rounds! Sit back with a cup of mulled cider and enjoy the best of the past month:
Revere at Effect Measure tells the tale of Streptococcus pneumoniae serotype 19A--a serotype that's not included in the current vaccine, but has increasingly…
October 31, 2007
Salmonella species are frequent human pathogens. An incredibly diverse genus, different types of Salmonella infect an enormous variety of species, from mammals to fish to invertebrates. They are typically acquired via ingestion of contaminated food or water, and the bacteria then seed the…
October 30, 2007
I'll be hosting the latest edition of Pediatric Grand Rounds here this coming Sunday. Send along submissions dealing with any aspect of children's health to me by Saturday evening for inclusion.
October 29, 2007
Edited to add: we've reached our goal! Thank you so much to all who participated; if others would still like to donate, Janet has a list of other blogger challenges--and remember that every completed challenge gets a 10% completion bonus from DonorsChoose, stretching your donation farther.…
October 25, 2007
For those of you who might not brave the comments threads on any HIV post, you may have missed this tidbit of information. I've written about "investigative journalist" Liam Scheff previously; he's an HIV "dissident" and author of a story from a few years back titled "The House that AIDS Built".…
October 23, 2007
It's only taken 30 years, but information about Ebola in nature is finally starting to snowball. First, after almost 15 years of disappearing from the human population, Ebola returned with a vengeance in the mid 1990s, causing illness in 6 separate outbreaks in Gabon, Ivory Coast, Democratic…
October 18, 2007
A few news stories hit my inbox all at once yesterday--and the combination of them doesn't bode well for childrens' health; more after the jump.
First, despite several years now of banging the drum for having kids vaccinated against influenza, they're still being overlooked when it comes to…
October 17, 2007
The DonorsChoose drive here at ScienceBlogs is just over halfway finished. My challenge is almost 50% funded, with $952 raised so far as I write this and donations from 10 of you out there (and thank you very much for that). There's still quite a ways to go, however, and many incentives to get…
October 16, 2007
Busy day here, but I do have a brief post up on MRSA over at Correlations if you're looking for some reading material.
[Edited to add: Mike has a lot more new MRSA stuff here; well worth reading!]
October 16, 2007
Revere weighs in regarding the Ferrell case. He also mentions one ironic point regarding bioterrorism history and one of the bacteria used, Serretia marcescens, that I hadn't thought to mention.
October 15, 2007
Being a microbiologist can be a dangerous business. Some of us work out in the field, exposed to weather, animals, and pathogens of all different forms. Some do research in countries with unstable governments, collecting samples and tracking down infected individuals in the midst of strife,…
October 15, 2007
A few stories elsewhere on vaccines, zoonotic disease, a new Gates initiative, and the environment that deserve your attention:
Paul Howard on what we need to do about vaccines. Like Greta's article, Howard notes the short memories of many vaccine opponents, and also discusses the effect…
October 12, 2007
I don't even have to comment on this article from the LA Times about a new major in homemaking (for women only, of course) at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. So much in the article speaks for itself.
Painful excerpts below:
Seminary President Paige Patterson and his wife, Dorothy --…
October 10, 2007
A reader passed along a link to this post on Short memories: AIDS denialism and vaccine resistance. The author learned that a friend had dated an AIDS denialist:
This was absolutely the wrong thing to say to our friend, who had been an AIDS activist since the early days of the epidemic, had…
October 10, 2007
Monday's post highlighting a few of the DonorsChoose projects brought in a few more donations, so check out another round of teacher-initiated projects, and throw in a few dollars if you're able (or more than a few--I still have almost $1700 to go to reach my goal, or even another $900 to reach the…
October 9, 2007
Science blogger Shelley Batts of Retrospectacle is once again in the running for a nice chunk of change via the 2007 blogging scholarship. She's one of 20 finalists, and as things stand, it's a close race (and to be honest, some of her closest challengers are just pretty lame). So she'd very much…
October 9, 2007
Following a new PNAS paper regarding the strange facial cancers in Tasmanian devils, I have a post on the topic up over at Correlations. (Be sure to check out the Correlations homepage too!)
October 9, 2007
If you thought botflies were bad, check out Bug Girl's post on tumbu flies.
The adult flies lay their eggs on wet laundry hanging out to dry, or in the soil or sand. Within two days, larvae hatch, and can remain alive for up to two weeks. During that time, if they come into contact with skin, they…
October 8, 2007
That's the thrust of an interesting editorial in Nature Medicine: what would you do if you could publish only 20 papers throughout your career? And how would it affect research productivity, scientific publishing, tenure review, and a host of other issues? More after the jump...
The editorial…
October 8, 2007
I've been remiss at soliciting more funding for the Scienceblogs DonorsChoose challenge. All told, Sciencebloggers have raised over $12,000 total so far to fund teacher-initiated, citizen-funded projects--$175 of that from here at Aetiology thus far, so I have a bit of catching up to do. I know…
October 3, 2007
I mentioned a new blogging project I'm involved with last week--a group blog called Correlations in conjunction with PBS and WIRED magazine. Well, now it's up and running, so take a minute to poke around and read more about my other co-bloggers. Just intro posts are up for now, but "real"…
October 2, 2007
Got a grant off earlier today, so I'm unwinding a little bit tonight (before I unleash an exam upon my students tomorrow). In the meantime, I just found out an interview I did about my S. suis research back in August was in last week's JAMA.
Back with more tomorrow...
October 1, 2007
Last week, our friendly neighborhood germ theory denier told us that:
A thing can only be a problem as long as you believe in it.
Now, think and don't stop before you've seen the light. (Hint: think of evil witches, dragons, ghosts etc. Do you believe in them? Yes? Then they're a problem for you.…
October 1, 2007
Last year, a number of us here at Scienceblogs participated in a fundraising challenge to help an organization called DonorsChoose. This is a charity that brings together proposals submitted by teachers out there in the community, and individuals who are looking for a way to help out our schools…
September 30, 2007
Over at Respectful Insolence, Orac discusses an article where a scientist has spent his days shut away, slaving endlessly over a data set--of pictures of topless models. Why? To produce the perfect boob job, of course--or as the article puts it, "to help Hollywood look even more perfect."
Great.…