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January 18, 2009
What with college bowl games, NFL play-offs, the Superbowl and the NCAA basketball tournament around the corner, God is pretty busy these days, helping teams win and athletes look gook. Maybe this accounts for His lack of attention to poverty, war, cruelty, hatred and every conceivable kind of…
January 17, 2009
Prions, the infectious proteins that are the likely agents of Kuru, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease ("Mad Cow Disease"), scrapie in sheep and Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) of elk and deer, are the zombie undead of pathogens. Almost nothing we do inactivates them. They withstand fire, autoclaving…
January 16, 2009
I'm on the road today. I'm a member of an external advisory committee for a research program at a university about an hour by car from my own. Not bad duty. You get to listen to scientists talking about science all day (some of us actually like that) and you get asked your opinions (whether well…
January 15, 2009
New Scientist reporter Mark Buchanan has a fascinating article this week on "the curse of work." The title might be the least satisfactory thing about this examination of a new mathematical article that attempts to explain the inexplicable:
"Parkinson's law", first published in an article of 1955,…
January 14, 2009
Last week we alerted you to a gross miscarriage of justice involving two doctors in Iran. Many of you responded by calling the Mission of Iran at the UN and signing a petition. I wish I could report good news in this update, but so far what we have heard is not encouraging. From an email from…
January 14, 2009
One of the triumphs of 19th and 20th century public health was the provision of piped water into cities and towns. With the use of modern methods of disinfection (primarily chlorination) water as a source of mass distributed poisons rapidly receded, and with it the preponderance of infectious…
January 13, 2009
I know I shouldn't, but I just have to ask. What's with the bath tubs on the Cialis ads? (in case you live in a bubble, Cialis is for "erectile dysfunction," what we used to call impotence).
The original Cialis ads were faux tasteful things (at least compared to the really toe curling "Viva Viagra…
January 13, 2009
Whenever you read about some high profile drug company trial where the smoking gun is some incriminating email, do you shake your head and wonder, "How could they have written that in an email?" There are two ways for a drug company to protect itself from being nailed by these kinds of emails. The…
January 12, 2009
Some people complain the news about the Gaza massacre is one sided or incomplete. And it is both. This is one reason it appears one sided. Because it is. And it's incomplete. In the US we don't see this (h/t The Brain Police):
January 12, 2009
DemFromCt's excellent post at DailyKos alerted us to the fact that this year's vaccine appears to have a mismatched influenza B component. Each year vaccine makers try to anticipate the strains that will be circulating 6 months hence, based on surveillance data. They have been fairly good with…
January 11, 2009
We've been blogging about flu for over four years. It's not a rare topic these days. But when we started we only found two other bloggers with an interest in the subject. One was the late (and much missed) Melanie Mattson at Just a Bump in the Beltway blog. The other was DailyKos frontpager…
January 11, 2009
We are getting the first hints of a potential foodborne vehicle for the multi-state salmonella outbreak that began in September. We've seen it before:
The source of the outbreak of Salmonella [t]yphimurium that has sickened at least 400 and may have contributed to one death has been identified in…
January 11, 2009
Atheism is making the rounds in the United Kingdom. Street by street. Bus stop to bus stop. A message of godlessness is being emblazoned on the sides of some 800 buses:
Really not offensive, unless anything questioning God's existence is offensive. Apparently to a great many people it isn't. The…
January 11, 2009
A genuine fear among many in the public health community was that Obama would not replace Dr. Julie Gerberding as Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (aka, the CDC). I am relieved to report that she will be out in 9 days, although she isn't going willingly and will wring…
January 9, 2009
The whole Scienceblogs.com site (all 60 plus blogs) will be performing an upgrade to Moveable Type 4 starting today at about 1 pm (Eastern Standard Time, US, Friday, Jan. 9). The site will remain up but there will be no posting and no commenting until the upgrade is complete, we hope by late…
January 9, 2009
You may be surprised to learn (I was) that the US is having a large (almost 400 people) multistate (42) salmonella outbreak (S. typhimurium, often but not always associated with poultry and dairy products). So far 67 hospitalizations, with patients spanning the age spectrum (ages 1 to 103).DNA…
January 8, 2009
Mrs. R. and I tend to favor organic produce, just on general principles. It's a bit more expensive but compared to eating out it's nothing and we aren't such volume consumers that we can't make it up by my buying one less book a month. And while Obama's many of Obama's cabinet picks have gotten…
January 7, 2009
Many of you were readers here when science bloggers and scienceblogs in particular played a pivotal role in the case of the Tripoli 6, medics under sentence of death in Libya over trumped up charges of infecting children with HIV. Another urgent matter now confronts the worldwide scientific…
January 7, 2009
For some years I have been playfully asking students and colleagues (all active health professionals or professionals to be) if they could tell me the name of the Surgeon General of the United States. Few could. In fact, last night the current Acting Surgeon General's name was mentioned and I had…
January 6, 2009
I will admit to a prejudice that may disqualify me from civilized company. I don't like the game of golf. When I was a youngster the first paying job I had (if I don't count delivering newspapers) was as a golf caddy at a ritzy country club (the kind that didn't admit people like me as members,…
January 5, 2009
Yesterday's New York Times carried a very long piece (more than 5000 words) by Scott Shanes on the anthrax attacker case. You may remember that shortly after Dr. Bruce Ivins, the Fort Detrick scientist who worked on anthrax, allegedly committed suicide (see posts here), the FBI announced he was the…
January 4, 2009
This is about the Israeli invasion of Gaza. Because it cannot be ignored. Let me be clear at the outset: I think the assault on Gaza is brutal, vicious and cruel, the act of a notorious regional bully. Israeli leaders (Olmert, Barak, Livni and probably others) are war criminals in a class with…
January 4, 2009
It's time once again for the inimitable Marcus Brigstocke on The Abrahamic Religions. Yes, I know we've done it before, but some of you may have missed it and those who have seen it will get to see it again because you can't see stuff like this too often. Especially when two of the main Abrahamic…
January 3, 2009
Seventeen days left in the Bush administration. With the fiscal crisis it isn't clear some urgent matters will be attended to right away by the Obama folks, but one can hope. Urgent matters like getting the Food and Drug Administration back on track protecting our food supply. Consider this FDA…
January 2, 2009
Promises, promises. Since the New Years is a time for resolutions, we bring you news you already know about resolutions. News like this. Evolution has hard wired a drive to reproduce in young, healthy humans. That's how the species survives. Maybe you don't want them to have sex and maybe they even…
January 1, 2009
Loyal reader Man of Misery sends this recap of 2008 from Uncle Jay. I had an Uncle Jay. But he was an orthodontist. Not like this Uncle Jay.
Happy New Year boys and girls:
January 1, 2009
One tradition of News Years Day in the US is the college football bowl game. When I was young I always watched the Rose Bowl (my state university was in the Big Ten league), but I have gotten away from it and don't expect to be glued to the TV today. But there will still be something glued to the…
December 31, 2008
Every couple of months a major flu paper appears purporting to reveal why the 1918 H1N1 virus was so horrifically virulent in comparison to the other pandemic viruses of the last century, H2N2 (1957 pandemic) and H3N2 (1968 pandemic). It's not just the H1N1 subtype of the influenza A virus that…
December 30, 2008
About ten people sent us links to the Washington Post front page news that isn't news to anybody in occupational health. "Under Bush," the headline read, "OSHA Mired in Inaction." You don't say!
In early 2001, an epidemiologist at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration sought to publish…
December 29, 2008
The fact that EPA has just approved a safer and more environmentally sound refrigerant is amazing news in itself. But the story behind this new product is even more amazing. The material, called HCR-188c, is a hydrocarbon blend of common materials (among them ethane, propane, isobutene, normal…