revere
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I'm still trying to get my blood pressure under control over last week's House FISA vote that gives telecom companies immunity for illegal acts. The focus of my anger is not on Republicans. Republicans have shown themselves reliable enemies of civil liberties and everyone expects them to protect…
Every time I write about the hazard of phones some readers flip out. The hazards of non-ionizing radiation, whatever the evidence (and it is controverted, difficult, ambiguous and contradictory), seems to acquire a junk science label from people who don't have much training or experience in…
Traveling and busy as hell, but wanted to share this. The ever expanding copyright laws is one of my pet peeves, but almost as irritating as the increasing length of copyright is the difficulty in knowing if something is still under copyright. The copyright date and name of the copyright holder in…
In our earlier discussion of the science behind greenhouse gases we pointed out that all objects radiate electromagnetic radiation, doing so at a peak wavelength dependent upon their surface temperatures. That means two things. One is that things at the usual temperatures in our world are radiating…
One thing about the sixties. If you weren't there, it can be hard to understand the real message. For the age challenged, here is one of the great Beatles songs sung by the one-of-a-kind Joe Cocker at Woodstock in 1969, complete with subtitles so you can understand the words:
Hat tip Jesus…
The Atlanta Journal Constitution (AJC) newspaper is the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) worst nightmare because it continually runs in depth stories about why CDC is the worst nightmare for scientists concerned with laboratory safety. CDC is the agency supposedly ensuring the public's safety from…
There is a great deal of activity on the bird flu vaccine front. Several different new techniques to make vaccines are being tested and so are additives to vaccines, called adjuvants, that boost the ability of the preparation to induce the body to make sufficient antibodies to protect us against…
The hardest and most dangerous agricultural work in the United States is not done by people who are citizens. It is done by immigrants. Some don't have proper documents but many do. Documents don't protect workers from dying. And agricultural workers die of heat stroke at 20 times the rate of other…
Since it's a lazy summer weekend (the first of the summer, astronomically speaking -- that is, if you believe the earth goes around the sun), I was lazily contemplating some of the dumbass things said about one of my sciblings, PZ Myers, by another one of my sciblings, Matt Nisbet. The clip Matt…
The beach in Indonesia may look nice, but don't let that distract you:
There is an English word for deliberately neglecting to tell people something they have asked you about. It's called lying. On that basis, the Indonesian government, primarily in the person of their Minister of Health, Siti…
This is the third (and last) post in our primer of the science of green house gases (see the first two here and here). Our objective is to explain what makes something a greenhouse gas. Why is CO2 a greenhouse gas and not O2 (oxygen) or N2 (nitrogen)? In the first two posts we set the table by…
In the first post in this primer series we discussed the nature of electromagnetic radiation. It is via EM radiation that the sun's energy reaches the earth and since it is the balance between the energy that reaches the earth and the energy that is radiated away from the earth that is at the…
Objection to the scientific basis of greenhouse warming seems to be the gift that keeps on giving. That is, if you like getting the same gift over and over again and returning it because it's defective never works. Still, hope springs eternal that understanding something about it will make the…
Since we don't do much health services posting around here I sometimes forget how terrific the blog Health Care Renewal is. It's always interesting. Sometimes it brushes against things we are concerned about here and last week there was a post with some good links about GlaxoSmithKline, a Big…
Our post on what is behind the Right Wing attack on science drew a lot of attention and numerous comments. I'd like to emphasize some key points that may have gotten lost in the details (for the details, please see the original post). We'll use climate change skepticism as an example, but the…
Of the many tag lines I've seen as part of people's electronic signatures, the most apt for this post is this one:
"I used to care about stuff. Now I have a pill for that."
Sergeant Christopher LeJeune was anxious and depressed after long duty on Baghdad's dangerous streets. He often had to…
Some readers are skeptical of global warming and we sometimes get hit and run types who want to declare the threat of a pandemic a hoax cooked up by Donald Rumsfeld to make money on Tamiflu. Since I want everyone to feel welcome here, this is for you guys:
petit pas from mapo_mapos on Vimeo
If you want to see what difference environmental protection enforcement makes, just go to eastern Europe or the former Soviet Union. Or China. In the 1970s the US led the world in cleaning its environment and was consolidating its gains with well-staffed, motivated federal and state environment…
Crof, over at H5N1, has an important piece on Indonesia that is worth thinking about. He observes something that lots of us haven't paid attention to: Indonesia hasn't been notifying the UN agency on animal health, the OIE, about bird flu outbreaks in poultry for almost two years:
Here is the very…
You know any post that starts out . . .
Gerardo Castillo, 30 years old, had worked at the Blommer Chocolate Co. for 9 years. His family wanted him to quite ever since an explosion in a roaster killed a fellow worker and injured another. He was fearful himself, but he stayed on . . .
is going to…
It was a sixties-style wedding, only 20 people including the Baptist minister and the bride and groom. I was there with my friend. The guests were all family except for three close friends of the couple and the officiating Minister, chosen because his church was rent-free home for innumerable…
Last fall the animal slaughter giant Tyson Foods, Inc. was selling chickens with a USDA approved label, "raised without antibiotics." Some people thought that was a bit misleading insofar as Tyson routinely used ionophores in their feed designed to prevent a fungal disease in the birds. The USDA…
The controversy over the health of rescue workers at the World Trade Center site goes on. The Wall Street area was re-opened quickly after 9/11 despite EPA air tests that showed hazardous materials in the air by direct orders from Condeleeza Rice's office when she was National Security advisor to…
We do a lot of Christian baiting here. Admittedly the tendency of many Christians to make lampooning easy is a factor. But we need to give other religions a chance, too. So we bring you now Richard Dawkins pwning an orthodox rabbi. What I particularly like about this is the way Dawkins highlights…
Like most public health scientists I am fascinated by the complicated relationship between the environment and disease. You build a military base somewhere and sexually transmitted diseases follow. You build a dam in Egypt and urinary schistosomiasis, a chronic debilitating disease that also…
The Indonesian Health Minister, Siti Fadilah Supari, has figured out how to deal with her country's reputation as being the bird flu capital of the world. She isn't going to announce deaths from the disease as they happen:
A 15-year-old girl died of bird flu last month, becoming Indonesia's 109th…
Does the Obama candidacy signal a return of "the sixties"? It's possible. What does that mean? Even those us who were there remember the sixties imperfectly. Not because we were permanently stoned. Memory is selective. We remember it as better than it was. We were young, and that makes a difference…
What do the US states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Colorado, Kansas, Idaho, Illinois and Indiana have in common? They are locations of reported illnesses from Salmonella Saintpaul infections, forty in Texas and New Mexico alone, with 17 hospitalizations. Thirty more cases have been…
Recently we noted the passing of Mildred Loving, whose Supreme Court case in the 1960s struck down the nation's anti-miscegenation laws. Mildred was black. Her husband Richard was white. It seems like such a distant event, although I was already in medical school when it happened. What hasn't died…