revere
Posts by this author
April 1, 2008
If you were infected with seasonal influenza virus, how long before you start having symptoms (the incubation period)? How about how long before you start shedding virus so that you can infect others (the latent period)? When are you most infectious? Expert opinion. based on experience and the…
March 31, 2008
Record and movie companies want to turn file sharing into a moral issue -- I think there are some moral issues here, although they fall on both sides -- but in reality everyone knows it's just about money and the fact that they have their hands on the levers of the legal system which they use for…
March 31, 2008
Trust is not transitive, as someone recently pointed out, when reporting on the airline pilot who carried a gun into the cockpit and then accidentally or negligently discharged it and blew a hole in the plane. We had every reason to trust the pilot to be able to fly a 747, but not necessarily to…
March 30, 2008
Homeland security is a priority for the Bush administration. I know that because they keep telling us. We have to take off our shoes and take out our identification getting on and off planes. Not just any identification, either. Official stuff. And crossing borders -- any borders, even the border…
March 30, 2008
Let's face it. The US education system sucks. The public school system was a great historical achievement, producing high literacy rates, but in the 21st century the US is increasingly at a competitive disadvantage compared to other industrial nations. Instead of investing more we are investing…
March 29, 2008
If you are so paranoid you have trouble sleeping, the Quantum Sleeper is just the thing for you. It's a bed made to protect you from biological and chemical terrorist attacks, natural disasters (tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, earthquakes), kidnappers/stalkers and features bulletproof "saferoom"…
March 28, 2008
I sometimes wonder if ordinary people in Texas are as stupid as many of the leaders they elect, but the evidence is that most aren't. Take the west Texas jury who heard case of Tim Stevens of Amarillo, 53 years old, and suffering from HIV/AIDS. He also had a cyclical vomiting syndrome, for which he…
March 28, 2008
Hard on the heels of my semi-facetious prediction that bird flu would return to Germany because Germany had declared itself bird flu free, the Swiss announced an infected wild duck on the shores of Lake Sempach. Since this duck didn't have a passport on him I am sure he never strayed over the…
March 27, 2008
I've eaten beef jerky on occasion and rather liked its spiciness. I'm not an aficionado, however, and didn't know much about it. I did look at the Wikipedia article on beef jerky where you will find more than any sane person would want to know about the food aspects of the subject, but with the…
March 27, 2008
Bird flu is a viral disease but its effects go beyond viral infection. An obvious but important fact. Consider Egypt.
The first poultry cases in Egypt were only a little over two years ago, but the virus quickly took root there. The poultry infections were a harbinger of human infections, 18 that…
March 26, 2008
The Reveres are crazy busy. So what do we do to keep this space from going dark? We put up posts like this one:
Identigene is selling at-home DNA testing kits for paternity testing at drugstores across the country. The $30 kit includes swabs for the child, mother, and "alleged father," consent…
March 26, 2008
Germany has been free of bird flu in poultry for three months. I predict they are about to have another outbreak. How do I know? Because every time I see something like this it's like a signal to whatever fickle gods control these things:
The German government declared on Tuesday the country is…
March 25, 2008
Of course the 4000th US combat death in Iraq is an artificial milestone. It's not different than the 10th or the 3999th or what will for certain be the 4010th, a human being in the prime of life who is alive now but won't be by the end of next week. But the number 4000 is a symbol that stands for…
March 25, 2008
We've covered the Indonesian refusal to cooperate with international influenza surveillance system to a fare thee well (see posts posts here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and links therein), so this is just an update with some additional observations how…
March 24, 2008
The other day, as I was bemoaning the tanking of the dollar versus the Euro (yes, my European friends are not crying in their beer over it; I'm glad for them. Now they can visit), I mentioned that it wasn't just the dollar that had taken a bath since GWB but also the US reputation as a force for…
March 24, 2008
If you want to know what advances in public health and medicine in the last 150 years have done the most for the overall health of the community a major contender for the top spot would have to be the provision of safe and abundant drinking water. The first piped water supplies for major American…
March 23, 2008
My children are no longer young. In fact they are old enough to have children of their own and when my daughter asked me if I thought her then 6 month old should get a flu shot I didn't hesitate: Absolutely, I said. And he did. Two of them, the required number. That was just before the flu season,…
March 23, 2008
Some arguments against atheism just cannot be answered. Seriously.
Feel the Love! Not to mention the Peace and Joy. QED:
Speaking of Dawkins, the hilarious episode of PZ's expulsion from the screening of Ben Stein's Science Fiction movie, Expelled, is going viral on the net. Don't blame Stein,…
March 22, 2008
If you live in the US you know that the Fox News Network prides itself on being the Voice of the Fatherland, connotation intended. Fox and its sleazy news anchors are not only doggedly pro-Bush but doggedly Far Right and poorly concealed racists and nativists. I don't watch it (I take my daily…
March 21, 2008
They say politics makes strange bedfellows, so now that John McCain and Joe Lieberman are in bed together I hope they screw each other's brains out. John McCain may have sparked a little lover's spat yesterday when he encouraged Americans to go to Canada to buy lower priced drugs, something Joe…
March 21, 2008
While we are all waiting for the other shoe to drop and a nasty, rip roaring flu pandemic to come rushing down the tracks at us, lots of companies have jumped into the pandemic vaccine sweepstakes. Reuters reports that at least 16 companies are testing flu vaccines and probably even more are…
March 20, 2008
I eat a lot of salad. Not because I think they are healthy but because I like salads. When I go to lunch at the hospital cafeteria I usually eat from the salad bar, and believe me, that's not a pro-health measure. You'd know what I mean if you saw the salad bar. But green leafies are supposed to be…
March 20, 2008
I rarely report about suspected bird flu cases here, preferring to wait a couple of days to let things sort out. In the early years of this blog I did report about them in the course of time, experience and some reflection we have come to our present position. Besides, it's not necessary. There are…
March 19, 2008
I don't know whether to laugh or cry. A bit of each, I suppose. When I was a young man, traveling in Europe was great for Americans. For starters, everybody didn't hate us (thanks George!). For another, everything was cheap. The dollar was strong so the exchange rate favored us. Now the dollar is…
March 19, 2008
The chief veterinary officer of the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reaffirmed what everyone paying attention already knows: the bird flu situation in Indonesia is critical. The archipelago nation is the fourth most populous country in the world fragmented geographically on 17,000…
March 18, 2008
Ex-Governor of New York Eliot Spitzer made a critical mistake in his relations with a prostitute: he had sex with her. Sex is bad, at least in America. You'd think a politician would know better than almost anyone. You don't have sex with prostitutes. You take campaign money from them:
The Grocery…
March 18, 2008
Last week The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released a comprehensive pandemic flu guidance document for states, accompanying it with a web presentation, the first of three. I haven't seen the Web Seminar and only quickly perused the document, so I am commenting on the basis of a…
March 17, 2008
Sometimes when I surf the net looking for things to write about I run across things I don't ordinarily write about but attract my attention because they are especially pertinent to my own health. Here's an example. I recently herniated a disk, for which I took fairly hefty doses of anti-…
March 17, 2008
There are all sorts of ways to prepare for an emergency. One is to simulate it inside a computer (a computer model). But you don't have to simulate inside a computer. You can also do it in "meatspace" (aka, the real world). Dungeons and Dragons using books is one example of this. Another is to do a…
March 16, 2008
The headline seemed to say it all: "Funding Issues Stymie Pandemic Preparation." Right, I thought. All the money is going in to procurement, too little into shoring up a failing public health system. Little did I know:
The fear of bioterrorism and avian flu are driving a healthy new interest by…