revere
Posts by this author
March 16, 2008
Jokes that go, "What do you get when cross a such and such with a such and such" are legion. Jehovah's Witnesses seem to come in for more than their share of these jokes ("What do you get when you cross a Unitarian with a Jehovah's Witness? Someone who knocks on your door for no particular reason…
March 15, 2008
You may not know Joe Weizenbaum's name, but many people are familiar with the computer program he wrote more than 40 years ago, Eliza. Eliza mimics a Rogerian psychotherapist, picking up key words you type in and spitting them back in the form of questions:
You: "I feel anxious today." Eliza: "That…
March 14, 2008
A lot of kids have personal "culture heroes" when they are growing up. I suppose athletes and celebrities predominate, maybe a political personage here and there. But I suspect lots of kids also have scientists or artists as personal heroes. My own culture hero when I was a youngster (Elementary…
March 14, 2008
There are a lot of rats in this world and they have meat on them. I always wondered why they weren't more commonly used as a human food source. Bird flu has taken care of that. Enjoy:
March 13, 2008
Influenza is spread person to person but there are viruses that depend upon another intermediate host to travel from host to host. Many of these viral diseases are found in tropical climes, although they used to be common in temperate regions. The US had quite a lot of malaria and yellow fever in…
March 13, 2008
Few of us had heard of palm civets before SARS. Then these small nocturnal animals came under suspicion as the source of the human SARS virus. Civet cats were a wild animal delicacy in the area where SARS broke out and it was discovered that they were infected with the same virus as humans. Did…
March 12, 2008
Most of the surface of the earth is covered with water. Some of it is pretty deep (at least by human standards). Above us is the atmosphere. It goes up. Way, way up. So if we were to make a sphere with just the earth's water and another one with the atmosphere at standard temperature and pressure (…
March 11, 2008
I'm an advocate of using computer models to help us think about what might or could happen during various pandemic flu scenarios, but it is a technique with drawbacks. For one, it can suggest that some things might be possible that are either very difficult to do or aren't feasible. This happened…
March 11, 2008
As part of our jobs many of us read literature that few others see. For example, every two months I get a journal called Industrial Health, published (in English) by the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health of Japan. It's been around for a long time (it is now in Volume 46) and it's…
March 11, 2008
Here's what a flu pandemic might look like:
"In four weeks, we went from a ho-hum flu season to ridiculous overcrowding," said Dr. Maurice Ramirez, an emergency physician who works in several institutions in north Florida. "We have had so many people that we have them, not in beds in the hallway,…
March 10, 2008
Suppose you had a high priced lawyer who sent a notice to someone on your behalf certifying, upon pain and penalty of perjury, that the information in her notice was accurate but that it turned out it was nothing of the kind? And that the falsity of the statement would have been immediately evident…
March 10, 2008
I've said it before and I'll say it again. If you occupy a country you also assume responsibility for its public health. That's both international law and it's the right thing to do. In Iraq we haven't done that. So while I am about to say it once more, after I've said it I have something else to…
March 9, 2008
(Source unknown)
It's a lousy disease, but Radio New Zealand's headline has to be one of the more amusing headlines I've seen in ages: "Listeria sandwiches on sale at hospital cafe":
Listeria has been found in packaged sandwiches sold by a cafe at Middlemore Hospital, Auckland.
Food contractors to…
March 9, 2008
It was a big quake, 8.3 on the Richter scale. Epicenter: in the Pacific Northwest, Andreanof Island, Aleutian chain. The date was March 9, 1957. Until now, it's actual cause was unknown. Today we reveal the shocking details.
A rock on the bottom of the ocean near Andreanof Island randomly…
March 8, 2008
The first computer I used was a Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-9. It had 48K (that's 48KB, not 48MB or 48GB) of wound ferrite core memory that took up half a very large room. The we booted it with paper tape -- a strip of tape with holes punched in it that got read by a paper tape reader. First…
March 7, 2008
The Medicare Drug Prescription debacle ("Part D") was supposed to keep drug costs down by introducing competition. Write this bigger and you have John McCain's health care plan. But back to Part D. The American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), the lobbying group for geezers like me that I…
March 7, 2008
There are a lot of open questions about the influenza antiviral drug oseltamivir ("Tamiflu"), among them whether it works at all for bird flu (highly pathogenic influenza A/H5N1), and if it does, whether resistance will develop making it ineffective. But all the questions have a common assumption:…
March 6, 2008
We don't especially like being anonymous on this blog but we feel it is prudent given the retributive nature of this administration. We don't care that much ourselves as we are pretty well established. But we worry that our students, our colleagues and our institution will become collateral damage…
March 6, 2008
If you look at the bar chart below you will see that this year's bird flu season is shaping up to look pretty much like last year. In the first two months of the year there are a few more cases but essentially the picture looks much the same. If that is indeed true, then also expect a spike of…
March 5, 2008
Things are changing. And here's some evidence. This is a great story (hat tip Boingboing). It's about a new test for African sleeping sickness (trypanosomiasis), a disease carried by the tse-tse fly that afflicts an estimated 66 million people in 36 countries. Not a nice disease:
At first, the main…
March 5, 2008
Every once in a while we run across introductory presentations of basic bird flu-ology we think are particularly good. This is one. If you follow this area you won't learn anything new, but I think you'll be impressed by how concise and well chosen this material is. I have a few quibbles with the…
March 4, 2008
Americans work harder than Europeans -- often two or three jobs -- and even the well paid don't get much vacation. Most of us don't have vacation houses, either. But we aren't Republican Presidents. Ronald Reagan was one of the most famous vacationing presidents, spending a whopping 335 days of his…
March 4, 2008
Press releases are the way a lot of scientific information is released today. Straight to the public, no peer review. This has advantages and disadvantages. The advantages are speed and directness. No filtering through reviewers, journal editors, colleagues. And of course that's the disadvantage,…
March 3, 2008
Scienceblogs has a German cousin, Scienceblogs.de where I found this absolutely hilarious YouTube music video, "Scientists for a better PCR." Yes, it's an advert for a PCR device called a thermocycler but it's incredibly funny -- if you have that kind of sense of humor.
PCR is a technique called…
March 3, 2008
Highly pathogenic variant of avian influenza A of the subtype H5N1 is here to stay, at least in the world's poultry population. While it's around it continues to cause sporadic but deadly human infections, some 369 of them of whom 234 have died (official WHO figures as of 28 February 2008). So this…
March 2, 2008
The Indonesian virus sharing impasse is said to be over, and with the dénouement comes some fascinating new information. Many will remember the row started when an Australian vaccine maker took an Indonesian viral isolate and made an experimental vaccine from it (see many posts among those here).…
March 2, 2008
Tuesday, March 4, is another big voting day in four US states. It may decide who will be the Democratic Presidential nominee. There have been two debates recently between the contenders, Senator Clinton and Senator Obama. While many issues were discussed, religion was not. How can we make up our…
March 1, 2008
Full disclosure: I know the toxicologist who is the subject of this post. Not well. But I know her and I know her work and she is, as the story from the LA Times says, a highly respected scientist. And no shrinking violet, which accounts for the fact that the Bush EPA has dismissed her from an…
February 29, 2008
Flying like a bat out of hell is supposed to mean sudden, fast and wild.But how do bats fly? It turns out they have some unique tricks:
Bats have a clever aerodynamic trick to make flying easier, researchers have found: the sharp edge at the front of their wings cuts through the air in such a way…
February 29, 2008
All I can say is that it's a good thing Canadian Press's Helen Branswell isn't a blogger or she'd put all the rest of us flu bloggers out of business. She is the professional flu reporter's professional (one of the best of the flu reporters once described a story of hers to me as "annoyingly good…