revere
Posts by this author
March 3, 2010
The Reveres consider themselves progressives (check the masthead), a word used for people who believe government has a role to play to make the world better, but also tend to be social libertarians. Many scientists and doctors are progressive in that sense. But it's a mighty big tent, and…
March 2, 2010
This weekend I got a haircut and noticed for the umpteenth time that the hair from the top of my head (I still have plenty) that landed in my lap as I sat in the barber's chair was grey. This always surprises me because when I look in the mirror I don't have much grey hair. I have some, but not…
March 1, 2010
It really gives me heartburn to see an otherwise sensible article in AOLNews by Katie Drummond with a headline: "Hyping H1N1: Did It Create a Dangerous Flu Fatigue?" I don't know if that was her title or not. Newspapers have headline writers who often seem never to have read the piece they are…
February 28, 2010
Rabies is one of those diseases that scares the crap out of me. Once clinical symptoms start, it is essentially a death sentence. "Essentially" because there are 6 cases of survival in the medial record, but 5 of the 6 had had rabies vaccination prior to illness. A single case of survival in an…
February 28, 2010
According to some notorious hate groups, the Obama administration is meeting with hate groups:
Some conservative commentators are accusing the Obama administration of inviting "hate groups" into the White House by holding a meeting with a coalition of secularist and atheist groups.
Officials from…
February 27, 2010
Fifteen years isn't a long time. Most of us can remember what we were doing 15 years ago. Often it's the same thing we are doing now, job-wise. Sure our kids were just kids, not adults. But 15 years isn't a historical epoch. At least not when you are living through it. But the fact is we have gone…
February 26, 2010
It is becoming conventional wisdom that the 2009 H1N1 pandemic was not as severe as a bad seasonal flu year. That might be true, although I don't find it much comfort because a bad seasonal flu year is no less bad for being more familiar. But I am not yet willing to assent to the conventional…
February 25, 2010
If I screamed every time I wanted to scream after reading something on the internet, I'd be so hoarse I wouldn't be able to scream about something I hadn't read on the internet. Like the Obama administration's loser mentality or the Republican Party as just plain losers with no mentality at all. So…
February 24, 2010
This post contains an oldie but (fairly) goodie YouTube clip about PowerPoint (.ppt). I hate PowerPoint although I use it a lot out of laziness. I've been lecturing a long time and for at least half of it there was no such things as .ppt. If you had data you wanted to show, you thought long and…
February 23, 2010
Still working on the grant and today was our Mock Study Section. It was an experiment that in the view of all participants (there were about 35 reviewers in the room) was a highly successful one. But after hearing the litany of strengths and weaknesses I'm worn out. I naturally focussed on the…
February 22, 2010
This is our 10th post on the anthrax attacks. Will it be our last? Yes, if the FBI has anything to say about it. They are closing the case. A case they messed up pretty thoroughly from the outset but now want us to believe they've solved, even though the culprit they fingered, Dr. Bruce Ivins, a…
February 21, 2010
This clip is long -- about 20 minutes -- but fascinating. I was never bored. Not for a moment. It's a talk given at the 2006 TED Conference in Monterey by Professor Hans Rosling of Sweden's Karolinska Institute. It's about . . . well you decide what this is about. It starts out being about…
February 21, 2010
This is a warning. The clips below are offensive. The second one I've had sitting on my text editor for a couple of weeks and had decided it was too offensive to use in the Sermonette. Whatever some of you may think (assuming you think), this space is not designed to be offensive to religion. I…
February 20, 2010
The National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) has been conducted since 1957 and is one of the main instruments to get a glimpse at the health of the US population. The NHIS is a "multistage area probability design," or what many call cluster sampling. The idea is to first sample geographic areas in…
February 19, 2010
The UK has some of the worst libel laws in the world, heavily stacked in favor of those claiming almost any criticism is libel. Perhaps it is a carry over from the days when the upper class brooked no criticism, I don't know, but I was glad to sign a petition calling for reform of these ridiculous…
February 18, 2010
When I first started teaching as an academic and told my family I taught 6 hours a week, they probably thought I had it pretty easy. I'm also sure they wondered what I did the rest of the time. Teaching a couple of new courses is a big job and it often absorbs more than the usual 40 hour week, but…
February 17, 2010
Congratulations, North Carolina. You are getting brand new $52 million facility for your State Public Health Laboratory and Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, each in separate wings of a 220,000 square foot facility in Raleigh. Sounds great. But if you work there you might want to shower at home…
February 16, 2010
When I heard ace flu reporter Helen Branswell was covering the Olympics, I said to myself, "Hey, if she can do it, so can I!" So I'm covering the Olympics:
February 15, 2010
Studying the efficacy (effect under controlled conditions) and effectiveness (effect under real world conditions) of vaccines is a tricky business we've talked a lot about here. How do you know when someone has really gotten the vaccine? Just because you stuck the needle into them? That's a pretty…
February 14, 2010
The mosquito is the vector for diseases like malaria, yellow fever and West Nile. They are major scourges of public health, and while we have sunk a fair amount of money in drying to eradicate them, we haven't put as much money into developing the technology for the war on mosquitoes as the war on…
February 14, 2010
If I have to work on my grant on a Sunday morning, then you have to watch this. Penance. Because you aren't in Sunday School:
February 13, 2010
2009 was a dismal year, economically speaking -- unless you were a health insurer:
If no health care overhaul passes Congress, health insurers may be in for a windfall -- and one far larger that most Americans probably realize.
According to a study by a pro-health reform group published Thursday,…
February 12, 2010
We've written quite a bit about statins because there is evidence that these plentiful and cheap drugs may be useful in treating or preventing the innate immune system's catastrophic dysregulation sometimes called "cytokine storm" (see here, here, here, here, here for a few examples). A new study…
February 11, 2010
I admit there are some medical articles I just read the press release for. They are almost always articles in journals I don't have easy access to and don't read regularly, but when I run across a press release I find interesting enough to read and maybe post about, it often isn't so compelling I'm…
February 10, 2010
I'm a scientist and my research is supported by NIH, i.e., by American taxpayers. More importantly, the science I do is for anyone to use. I claim no proprietary rights. That's what science is all about. We make our computer code publicly available, not just by request, but posted on the internet,…
February 9, 2010
Like tens of millions (probably hundreds of millions globally) I watched the Superbowl on Sunday. With such an audience, ad time is notoriously and extravagantly expensive and some ads are only run once, at that venue (e.g., the famous Apple "1984" ad). For some people the ads are as much an…
February 8, 2010
Most people feel safe at home, but statistically it's not the safest place to be, at least in terms of being injured (here injury includes not only trauma but poisoning, but if we restrict it to trauma probably little is changed). Here's one of CDC's "Quickstat" looks at the percentage distribution…
February 7, 2010
I know families that if you visited them and found them laughing, confused, dizzy, thirsty and vomiting and apparently hallucinating you would think, "everything's normal." On a July night in suburban Maryland, however, an after dinner social call by a relative didn't think it was normal at all and…
February 6, 2010
Everyone knows, because the the Main Stream Media tells us, that bloggers aren't journalists. I freely admit I am not a journalist, not even a science journalist. Of course I do report a lot of science here and I know I do it better and more accurately than many a science reporter, but there are…