revere
Posts by this author
December 28, 2007
Former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, despite a bevy of bodyguards, was assassinated yesterday. Pakistan is a dangerous place, especially for pro-American politicians or those thought to be pro-Western officials. It's something to think about when you read that WHO and the US reference…
December 27, 2007
If you have heart disease or diabetes and you are uninsured you are worse off than those who are insured by several measures. Those are the kinds of health conditions that usually worsen with age, too, so you would expect this to be a bigger problem for the uninsured near elderly. But they don't…
December 27, 2007
Bird flu is still flu and one expects an uptick of cases during "flu season" which usually gets underway in earnest in December. So from that perspective it isn't a surprise that December has seen human fatalities from bird flu in six countries: Pakistan, China, Vietnam, Egypt, Burma and, of course…
December 26, 2007
There's a lot of stuff about tainted food in the news, whether it is toxins in imports or questionable additives in US products (e.g., bisphenol A in hard plastics). This stuff is not on any food label, of course, but there is a lot of detailed stuff that is on labels and increased concern about…
December 26, 2007
The Toronto Sun has another one of the "such and such a city/state/country isn't prepared for a pandemic" stories. The judgment comes from the 2007 Auditor General of Ontario's annual report. Yawn. Like it's so easy to know what to do, right? Maybe not. So the Report has some recommendations:
The…
December 25, 2007
Forty years ago I was the only doc in a bioengineering lab in a famous technical university. We had our own computer -- it took up a giant room -- and had attached to it a rare device in those days, a scanner for converting transparencies to computer readable form. It was really a cathode ray tube…
December 25, 2007
In my Christmas stocking this morning I found a Season's greeting from the excellent down-under medical/public health blog impactEDnurse. Here's the card and the link to the little present that goes with it:
I offer you up a nurses public service video on the best way to detect avian influenza:…
December 24, 2007
There are computers on a chip and labs on a chip and now explosives on a chip. Explosives on a chip? WTF?
This wonderful tech breakthrough is brought to us by Georgia Tech Research Institute and reported, straight-faced, by the Press Release service, Science Daily:
Developed by a team of scientists…
December 24, 2007
We've discussed the scandal over the use of Avastin and Lucentis for wet macular degeneration several times (here, here, here). If you've missed it, here's the gist. Avastin is a drug approved to treat colon cancer. It works by choking off blood vessels to the tumor. It turns out, however, that a…
December 23, 2007
The recent report of a novel influenza virus in pigs, the H2N3 subtype, has been raised some alarm in certain quarters. I just read the paper itself (doi: 10.1073/pnas.0710286104) and then the account in CIDRAP News, which is both accurate and complete. I recommend it highly as a summary of this…
December 23, 2007
PZ and Greg Laden have 'fessed up and long time readers know I write the same thing on my Sermonette each Christmas: I am a big fan of Christmas, godless bastard that I am. It is my favorite secular holiday and there is hardly anything about it I don't like. Well, there are a few things: like the…
December 22, 2007
WHO [World Health Organization] is now saying that human to human (H2H) transmission has not been ruled out in China or Pakistan:
China:
The World Health Organization said Friday it was impossible to say whether a case of bird flu in China involving a 52- year-old man was due to human-to-human…
December 21, 2007
Being a poultry worker, in any country is not wonderful. There's the risk of bird flu, of course. And lots of opportunity to be seriously injured. And its strenuous, difficult, low paying and dirty work, which is why it employs so many undocumented workers.
It also turns out it is a great way to…
December 21, 2007
It's been less than a week since the first reports out of Pakistan that cases of bird flu were appearing there. At the time we warned that the coming of flu season meant these kinds of reports were to be expected, but by the weekend concern increased as a family cluster appeared. As common in the…
December 20, 2007
One of the enduring mysteries is what causes traffic jams. Sometimes it's obvious -- sort of. I remember having to make a daily trip from New York to Bellevue Hospitals in New York down FDR Drive. At one spot the three southbound lanes suddenly widened into five lanes because of some construction…
December 20, 2007
Nature's senior correspondent, Declan Butler, was one of the first to raise the profile of a pandemic threat in the scientific community and has had done some superb reporting since, including several stories on sharing gene sequences. The problematic actors in his earlier stories were respected…
December 19, 2007
Bush and the Democratic Congress are still battling over the budget, although it is said they are getting closer. Getting closer to Bush unfortunately means giving him all the bombs and bullets he wants but not much else. A case in point is the latest proposal for the NIH and CDC budgets:
Over the…
December 19, 2007
We have occasion to comment often here about how the same bird flu story is spun different ways. A case in point is reporting on statements made by the head of Indonesia's National Avian Influenza Committee, Bayu Krisnamurthi and the two different directions Agence France Presse and Reuters took…
December 18, 2007
It is taking the Occupational Safety and Health Administratiohn (OSHA) a long time to write rules to protect flavoring workers from a serious lung disease called bronchiolitis obliterans, linked to artificial butter flavor used in microwave popcorn. According to the public health blog, The Pump…
December 18, 2007
I don't know much about the West African state of Benin, but the newswires have made sure to alert me to the fact it is the home of ritual Voodoo sacrifice. Which, it turns out, is relevant to bird flu because Benin is having a poultry outbreak with H5N1. This is not much of a surprise, as it is…
December 17, 2007
The title of the Nature paper is "Fetal load and the evolution of lumbar lordosis in bipedal hominins" (Nature 450, 1075-1078 (13 December 2007) | doi:10.1038/nature06342) and the Editor's comment is given the slightly snappier title, "The mother load." (Nature (DOI:10.1038/nature06342). But I like…
December 17, 2007
With everyone on tenterhooks over the confusing outbreak of human bird flu cases in Pakistan and the first reported case in Burma (aka Myanmar), WHO is taking the opportunity to give its member nations a pep talk about swift reporting. Since there is evidence the reporting might not have been so…
December 16, 2007
If I knew for sure what was going on with the reported human bird flu outbreak in Pakistan's northwest border region I'd tell you. At this point it appears no one knows for sure -- not WHO, not CDC, not even the Pakistani authorities. The region where the cases are reported is near the Afghan…
December 16, 2007
I'll give the clergy one thing: sermonizing can be hard work. Not always, of course. Some politicians and religious figures do it effortlessly, without thought, so to speak. Maybe I should leave off "so to speak." Without thought. Sometimes, though, it's hard to think of what to say on Sunday. But…
December 15, 2007
Since this is not a breaking news site, I am waiting to see what is going on in Pakistan. I'll likely sum up tomorrow afternoon what I find by then (I hope with some value added). Here are some places you can keep checking for breaking news. They are the usual suspects:
Helen Branswell's reports (…
December 15, 2007
As noted yesterday, it's flu season. That includes bird flu. So we are seeing cases pop up. Yet another in Indonesia and the father-son cases in China. Then reports out of Pakistan of the first human cases on the Indian sub-continent. Those case are as yet unconfirmed. Now WHO is confirming cases…
December 14, 2007
This Reveres lives in a major northeastern city. That's not a secret. The northeast gets snowstorms. Not a secret. Living in a major northeastern city when it has a snowstorm is an experience, and not a good one. No secret. I'm not telling you anything new. So it's no big surprise that I left the…
December 14, 2007
China tries to close the door on a possible H2H while Pakistan opens the door to human bird flu cases on the Indian sub-continent. First China. Two recent cases, a fatal case of a 24 year old male followed after a period of some days by the infection of his father raised the issue whether the son…
December 13, 2007
I'm not one of those people that thinks bloggers are all powerful but I know that blogs are often an effective way to expose bad behavior by some corporations. If I know this, you'd think everyone in the corporations would know it, too. I guess the word didn't get out to Best Buy:
Best Buy sent a…
December 13, 2007
The medical site WebScape has a service that caters to physicians called MedPulse. In about 20 specialty areas it surveys a dozen or two scientific journal and alerts subscribers to interesting or pertinent papers. I subscribe to the Public Health and Prevention topic and the other day got the list…