revere
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May 18, 2009
You probably have never heard of the Chemical Safety Board (unless you are a specialist in that area -- or you read The Pump Handle!). The CSB is an independent government agency that has a pretty low profile. Its mission, as its name implies, is to investigate industrial chemical accidents. The…
May 18, 2009
Five more schools in the New York City borough of Queens have closed because of suspected swine flu cases. Eleven schools have now been closed there and hundreds of students are down with a flu-like illness. Parents are understandably concerned, the more so because not many days ago Mayor Bloomberg…
May 17, 2009
At Friday's press briefing on the swine flu outbreak, Canadian Press's Helen Branswell twice asked whether CDC's weekly flu surveillance data showing the uptick in swine flu but also an unexpected prevalence in seasonal influenza was an artifact of increased testing or something new and unusual.…
May 17, 2009
Maude was a 1970s TV sitcom (on CBS) featuring a feisty but occasionally overbearing middle aged woman of the liberal persuasion and her fourth husband, Walter Findlay. Walter owned an appliance store in a suburb of New York. The show was a spin-off of All in the Family, another 70s sitcom that was…
May 16, 2009
The other shoe has dropped at CDC. Yesterday Obama named a new CDC Director, New York City Health Commissioner Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, an infectious disease specialist (drug resistant TB) who worked at CDC prior to going to New York in 2002. Frieden has long been rumored to be at the top of Obama's…
May 15, 2009
It is clear that if you want to get a so-so paper published in a top tier journal, the best way to do it is to write about a breaking medical news event and get there first. We saw this with avian influenza and SARS and now it's being repeated with swine flu. The Scientist had a story yesterday…
May 14, 2009
A reader (hat tip River) sent me a link to a New York Times piece quoting a physician who recently saw swine flu cases in Mexico City. He called attention to what seemed like an anomalous clinical presentation of many cases. Besides a higher proportion of gastrointestinal symptoms (nausea, vomiting…
May 13, 2009
Over at ScienceInsider (Science magazine's blog) Jon Cohen speculates about why swine flu seems to have spread faster and more widely in North America (Mexicon, US, Canada) than Europe and Asia. CDC thinks one reason is that by the time it was discovered here it had already spread widely. The…
May 13, 2009
Flu can be a nasty illness, nasty enough to kill you. Pregnant women are at more risk than others because their physiology is altered. They are carrying a foreign body (the fetus) so their immune response is not the same, and their cardiovascular and respiratory physiology are also different. CDC…
May 12, 2009
Trying to figure out where the incipient swine flu pandemic is heading and how fast it is heading there is shooting at a moving target, and this one is moving pretty fast. The best we can do at this point is use whatever information we have to make some educated guesses about different scenarios…
May 11, 2009
Yesterday DemFromCT had another in his continuing series at DailyKos on Flu and You (Part VIII). He extended an earlier post (part II) on a critical piece of public health infrastructure, laboratory surveillance. One of the graphics is this chart of influenza positive tests reported to the CDC by…
May 10, 2009
The spate of swine flu articles in The New England Journal of Medicine last week included an important "Perspective, The Signature Features of Influenza Pandemics — Implications for Policy," by Miller, Viboud, Baliska and Simonsen. These authors are familiar to flu watchers as experienced flu…
May 10, 2009
[Freethinker Sermonette is a regular Sunday feature here.]
When you don't exist any more as a functioning mechanism, worrying about what happens to your parts is not something to fret much about. And indeed I don't much care.
Well, maybe I care a little bit. Truth be told, there are some things I…
May 9, 2009
Maryn McKenna has a great piece at CIDRAP News today about something that should worry all of us as we wait to see if the other shoe drops with swine flu. Our acute care health services system is so brittle it won't take much to break it:.
With the global outbreak of novel H1N1 influenza (swine flu…
May 9, 2009
Most of us would agree that treating AIDS is not a crime. "Most of us" apparently doesn't include the Iranian judiciary and the Iranian government. We have posted on it several times (here, here, here) but for new readers, here's some background:
Doctor Arash Alaei and Doctor Kamiar Alaei are two…
May 9, 2009
Long time readers know that I am poorly disposed to religion (I understate). Particularly religion of the evangelizing sort. I wouldn't care if they didn't actively try to interfere in the public sphere. But they do, often in the most malignant ways. Still, when a religious organization recommends…
May 8, 2009
While swine flu as a public health issue is starting to fade from the headlines (its true status as a public health issue is another matter), the problems for the pork industry might just be starting. The industry wasn't well to begin with, and for some of its members, swine flu could be a terminal…
May 8, 2009
Late yesterday The New England Journal of Medicine published a number of papers on the recent swine flu outbreak. The first paper, "Emergence of a Novel Swine-Origin Influenza A (H1N1) Virus in Humans" by large federal-state team of epidemiologists describes 642 confirmed cases in 41 states as of…
May 7, 2009
It seems a conversation on one of the comment threads about "swine flu parties" at Effect Measure has made the New York Times:
One of the first open debates of the idea of intentional self-infection was on Effect Measure, a public health blog with many posts by thoughtful people who say they are…
May 7, 2009
Breathing easier, may be an apt phrase for an almost audible collective sigh of relief. So far, the incipient swine flu pandemic is not extremely nasty. Is this perhaps premature? The world's premier scientific journal, Nature, and many flu scientists, suggest it is:
Complacency, not overreaction,…
May 6, 2009
We get emails, all kinds of emails, from people thinking it would be great if we mentioned something near and dear to them on Effect Measure. We are flattered by this, of course, but we aren't journalists or a commercial site or a non-profit advocacy site (well, we are ultimately non-profit, but…
May 6, 2009
How fast flu spreads is related to how many susceptible people an infectious person can infect (a measure called R0) and also something called the serial interval. The serial interval is the average length of time between the start of one infection and the start of the infection of that case's…
May 5, 2009
If you've ever wondered how spammers got your email address, the answer might be that you gave it to them by following a link you thought had important or interesting information. We all know the kind of "interesting" information people will follow. Sex is the biggest business on the internet. But…
May 5, 2009
As I write this the US has 279 confirmed cases and one death from H1N1/2009 in 36 states. WHO has tallied 1085 1124 cases in 21 countries with 25 deaths. There is a backlog of samples waiting for confirmation, so by the time you read this the counters will probably have rolled upward, especially as…
May 4, 2009
Cytokine storm is a graphic phrase that doesn't do justice to the complexity of one of the things that made the 1918 H1N1 virus so virulent and is also implicated in the frightful case fatality of H5N1 ("bird flu"). The current H1N1/2009 is not showing a propensity to cause this nasty effect, but…
May 4, 2009
There have been questions in the comments about where the CDC estimate of 36,000 to 40,000 influenza related deaths a year comes from. It's a figure I've used a number of times here to say generally that regular old seasonal influenza may be a mild disease for some but not for many others. Even if…
May 3, 2009
Newspapers and wireservices are doing a terrific job keeping a flow of information on H1N1/2009 (the virus formerly known as swine flu). And so, I am happy to say, is the blogosphere. I don't want to slight some terrific bloggers by mentioning some and not others, so I won't do a blogroll. OK. I…
May 3, 2009
It's now fairly certain that humans have returned the favor and given H1N1/2009 to pigs, another example of a cozy flu swapping relationship now almost a century old. At the time of the 1918 pandemic, pigs were also suffering a serious influenza-like illness which was quickly dubbed "hog flu." The…
May 3, 2009
[New readers: the Freethinker Sermonette is a weekly feature here. If atheism bothers you, you can skip it. But please don't complain it has nothing to do with science. In our view, it has everything to do with science. The rest of you, enjoy.]
PZ over at Pharyngula has the most appropriate post…
May 2, 2009
CDC has posted images of the H1N1/2009 (aka swine flu) virus. This looks like it is grown in tissue culture (probably dog kidney cancer cells). It presents the ideal picture of a spherical virus studded with HA and NA protein spikes on its surface and enveloped with capsular material derived from…