revere
Posts by this author
February 9, 2009
I am frankly baffled by a news release from Gideon Informatics, a company that describes its mission as developing and marketing "point-of-care medical-decision support applications that help reduce diagnostic errors." It claims to be "managed by an expert executive team and medical advisory board…
February 8, 2009
The peanut butter with a side of salmonella story just keeps getting worse (other posts here, here, here, here, here, here). The toll so far is 8 dead, 575 confirmed salmonella cases (and undoubtedly many more never reported) and 1550 products recalled, one of the largest recalls in US history. The…
February 8, 2009
It's the long weekend of the stimulus watch. The fate of the nation hangs in the balance (well, maybe just the fate of my 401K, but I'd like to stop working before I'm 92). Meanwhile a few Republicans and some Democrats, who may as well be Republicans (Ben Nelson representing Nebraska, Joe…
February 7, 2009
It turns out that we were not the only ones musing on the relationship between the news business and the flu business. Dr. Michael Osterholm, is the Director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research & Policy (CIDRAP), and also Editor-in-Chief of the CIDRAP Business Source, a subscription…
February 6, 2009
For reasons other than this blog (I actually have a real life) I was reading a 1965 text by Leavell and Clark, Preventive Medicine for the doctor in his community: an epidemiologic approach, and found this on pp. 67-68 regarding tasks in a disease outbreak:
"Further spread must be prevented; the…
February 5, 2009
The question of reporting on flu comes up here from time to time and one of those times was a few days ago. In a post on the low path bird flu outbreaks in British Columbia's Fraser Valley we raised a number of questions we thought should have been asked by the Canadian Press's reporter. We drew a…
February 4, 2009
The financial industry (what's left of it) now knows what the food industry is learning (or never learned; take your pick). Effective regulation is good for business. Or rather, poor regulation is (very) bad for business. Latest exhibit: the gigantic recall of peanut products (international in…
February 3, 2009
On Sunday DailyKos frontpager, DemFromCT (who is also a founder of the FluWiki and a pulmonary specialist) finished up his two part interview with us. It's cross-posted here below the fold. If anyone doubted we were academics, the display of watching us argue with ourselves would have but those…
February 2, 2009
Yesterday there was a fairly long story from the wire service Canadian Press that wasn't written by their ace flu reporter, Helen Branswell. It carried the byline of Greg Joyce. I'll come back to why I mention this at the end of this post, but first, here's what it was about:
Three of four of the…
February 1, 2009
I like newspapers and we subscribe to two dailies at our house. But in truth I find myself reading the news online, not in dead tree form. We all know the newspaper business is in big trouble. Which is why there is something just a little creepy about this 1981 news story on San Francisco TV…
February 1, 2009
Forget about climate change. We're not going to make it that far. December 21, 2012 is earth's final day. If you'd like to know the details you can buy the exciting video teaching from Drs. Jack and Rexella Van Impe, December 21st 2012: History's Final Day. Everyone seems agreed on the date.…
January 31, 2009
The detritus of the Bush era continues to wash ashore, but some of it has decomposed sufficiently that it isn't as noxious as when first dumped into the sea. One example is what was left of a Federal lawsuit filed by a creationist post doc against the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution alleging…
January 30, 2009
CIDRAP News carried a short piece about the new CDC Acting Director, Dr. Richard Besser. We don't learn a lot new beyond the official facts. The Bush CDC Director, Dr. Julie Gerberding, resigned as the Obama Presidency began. The CDC Director is a non-career appointment, which means that it is made…
January 29, 2009
A powerful Editorial in today's Nature (the world's premier science publication) shines a strong light on a tragic violation of human rights in Iran involving two leading AIDS physicians, brothers Arash and Kamiar Alaei. We've posted about it twice (here and here). Declan Butler, a senior…
January 29, 2009
Getting a good night's sleep is supposed to boost your resistance so you don't get sick as easily. Or put another way, not getting enough sleep puts you at risk of colds and other nuisance infectious diseases. Is this just an old wives' tale? Apparently not. Or at least, now we can say there's some…
January 28, 2009
Even as the the peanut cum salmonella recall spreads (sorry, couldn't resist), we learn that the Peanut Corporation of America plant in Blakely, Georgia thought to be its source has a history of "problems":
The plant in Georgia that produced peanut butter tainted by salmonella has a history of…
January 27, 2009
On Sunday my friend and colleague from Fluwiki, DemFromCT, did me the honor of interviewing me on the front page of DailyKos. That's a pretty tall platform, being the most visited blog in the known universe (and beyond), so it's best to be absolutely clear when saying things there. I"m not sure I…
January 26, 2009
The peanut butter/peanut paste ingredient based salmonella outbreak has been in the news lately and we've discussed it here (and here, here, here, here, here). There are now about 500 reported cases and six deaths. That's a case fatality ratio of just over 1%. So what if there were a disease…
January 25, 2009
From a colleague who knows I am interested in prophylactics for flu:
Miss Beatrice, the church organist, was in her eighties and had never been married. She was admired for her sweetness and kindness to all.
One afternoon the pastor came to call on her and she showed him into her quaint sitting…
January 25, 2009
Our weekly feature:
So we had a joyous inauguration, although the obligatory religious bookends were a bit hard to take. The Invocation by Pastor Rick (Warren) was a real piece of work, typically self-righteous and obnoxiously exclusionary. It goes without saying he alienated atheists, but then he…
January 24, 2009
Writing a pseudonymous blog day after day can be wearing, especially as you get no personal recognition for it. That's the point of a pseudonym, after all. But sometimes things happen that are even better than personal recognition. On January 6, 2009, Vintage Books published the trade paperback…
January 24, 2009
A reader sent me a link to The Salt Lake Tribune that made me do a double-take: Health department on chopping block:
Utah could become the only state in the country without a state health department.
Republican lawmakers are considering handing the duties of the health department -- from tracking…
January 23, 2009
PetSmart's Grreat Choice Dog Biscuit isn't such a great choice for fido because they contain peanut paste with salmonella. It may also not be so Grreat for fido's owners:
Dr. Stephen Sundlof, a veterinarian who is the director of the FDA's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, said that the…
January 22, 2009
Readers want to know what I think about the bird flu situation in China, where four human cases have been reported in the last couple of weeks. I haven't said anything about it so far, which is normal for me. I usually like to wait for more information. There are dedicated and smart flu bloggers…
January 21, 2009
Some people noticed a remarkable thing that happened on the Washington Mall on Sunday at the Obama pre-Inaugural concert, a part of which I posted on Tuesday. The second last appearance was by Pete Seeger, his grandson Tao and Bruce Springsteen singing Woody Guthrie's This Land is Your Land. What…
January 21, 2009
While we were busy with the pageant of the new administration, we are still cleaning up the messes from past administrations (not just Bush although Bush was the examplar of incompetence). Past messes like a broken food safety system. The latest example, of course, is the peanut butter and peanut…
January 20, 2009
I'm glad I lived to see today. I've been a citizen of the United States for 66 years and I've never felt anything like it. Not because of the politics, since I suspect I will disagree with much of what the new President plans to do (not progressive enough for me), and not solely because the country…
January 19, 2009
Every disease has a website, it seems, and common diseases may have many. The UK has a charity devoted to asthma that has a site, AsthmaUK.com, with an interesting feature, an "asthma trigger" section that discussed things that may bring on asthma symptoms in people with asthma. Asthma is a disease…
January 18, 2009
DemFromCT has Flu and You, Part II up over at DailyKos. As with Part I, it is well worth reading. It implicitly raises an extraordinarily important issue -- the crucial value of the public health infrastructure -- and explicitly lays out a vital part of it, the public health laboratory network.…
January 18, 2009
The four month old salmonella outbreak (here, here) that has already claimed at least five lives seems now to be an "ingredient" affair. The ingredient is peanut butter made in a Georgia plant of the Peanut Corporation of America (PCA) and sold to food distributors in bulk for use in institutions…