revere
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December 12, 2007
It's bad enough that health care workers have to worry about getting bird flu, Ebola and SARS. But even if they aren't in contact with infected patients there are many other hazards in a health care institution. Ergonomics issues are a big deal (I worked my way through school as a "transport"…
December 12, 2007
The dramatic infectious agents like MRSA, Ebola and bird flu get the headlines but there are a lot of others out there, some of them capable of being just as nasty. Consider the new variant of adenovirus serotype 14, for example:
Infectious-disease expert David N. Gilbert was making rounds at the…
December 11, 2007
One of the most effective environmental regulations that wasn't a command and control item was something called the Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) Program. Here's EPA's description:
The Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) is a publicly available EPA database that contains information on toxic chemical…
December 11, 2007
Concern about cutting down the rain forests is not just a conservationists hobby horse. As more and more trees are cut down for their wood and the land cleared for agricultural use the unplanned consequence is that more an more mobile and traveling humans come in contact with animals for the first…
December 10, 2007
There are a lot of diseases out there you haven't heard of and most of them are things you don't want to get. One of them is a neurological autoimmune disease called chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy (CIDP) where the body attacks the covering of nerve fibers and prevents impulse…
December 10, 2007
The debate about how much wild migratory birds contribute to the spread of highly pathogenic influenza/A H5N1 goes on. According to a sensible Commentary in Nature (Dec. 6) it needn't. We should have taken steps some time ago to answer an answerable question. But we didn't and still haven't…
December 9, 2007
There's a growing Ebola outbreak in Uganda. We've been watching it and I've gotten an email or two wondering why we weren't posting on it. There are a lot of nasty disease outbreaks in the world and we don't cover most of them. Ebola gets news because it is a hideous disease with high fright value…
December 9, 2007
Mitt Romney's "Mormons are Christians -- really!" speech ("I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the Savior of mankind."), also established that non-believers are not Americans -- really!
And you can be certain of this: Any believer in religious freedom, any person who has knelt in…
December 8, 2007
Earlier in the week we discussed the unfortunate 24 year old man who died of bird flu in Nanking in Jiangsu province. He had had no known contact with sick poultry. Now the father has bird flu. Did the father get it from the son? Did both get it from the same source? Or two different sources? Those…
December 7, 2007
A reader alerted me to a poignant "confessional" from arch conservative William F. Buckley (hat tip Cathie). Buckley, the founder and long time editor (now retired) of the very conservative National Review is devoted to the Free Market, devoted as in religoius adoration. But it seems that even he…
December 7, 2007
This post is about something I've wanted to write about for a while, but never found the time. That's still true, but I've just spent five days as a natural environment for a norovirus or something similar. The good news is I lost 5 pounds. But the bad news -- and there was a lot of it -- is that…
December 6, 2007
As an (unplanned) follow-up to today's morning post about public health use of the internet we have tonight's event in Second Life, a chance to meet and chat with wiki partner DemFromCT:
Our next installment of the Virtually Speaking interview series takes place TONIGHT, Thursday, at 6pm Pacific/9…
December 6, 2007
YouTube is a phenomenon. We've gotten so used to it (and its user generated content cousins) sometimes we don't realize how potent it is. Potent and in the hands of all sorts of people. Creative, crazy, evil, well meaning, ordinary, boring . . . you get the idea. And getting ideas is another thing…
December 5, 2007
Most people in the developed world think of measles as a pesky but fairly benign childhood disease. For the current generation, who has had the benefit of immunization with measles vaccine, it is also a historical curiosity. Not so for the developing world, where measles has been a major killer of…
December 5, 2007
Indonesian Health Minister, Siti Fadilah Supari, has reiterated her refusal to share isolates of H5N1 virus (it's unclear if this is her decision alone or is the considered decision of the Indonesian government). This came at the current inter-minsterial conference on bird flu on underway in Delhi…
December 4, 2007
If you need the antibiotic ciprofloxacin ("cipro") (famous for its use as prophylactic agent for those potentially exposed to weaponized anthrax in 2001), I know where you can find a lot of it. In Patancheru, India, near Hyderabad, one of the world's centers for production of generic drugs. Most…
December 4, 2007
China has just registered its 26th known case of bird flu and its 17th death. I emphasize known, because in a country of over 1.3 billion that has not been able to eradicate this virus from its vast poultry population, it would seem the real number is probably quite a bit higher. But what I want to…
December 3, 2007
Carnegie-Mellon is a great university and when it comes to robotics and computer science is always on the cutting edge. But does that cutting edge have to be so sharply lethal?
Unmanned aircraft are showing up in the skies more often and today the US Army awarded $14.4 million to Carnegie Mellon…
December 3, 2007
I'm traveling so I'll let other bloggers do the heavy lifting. And I can always count on flu bloggers of note, Crof and SophiaZoe. Both discuss and link to reports of H5N1 in refrigerated turkey meat sold in stores in Poland (I particularly recommend SZ's excellent summary of the safety issues).…
December 2, 2007
It's been a while since we pressed this particular button but it seems it's time:
Baghdad is facing a 'catastrophe' with cases of cholera rising sharply in the past three weeks to more than 100, strengthening fears that poor sanitation and the imminent rainy season could create an epidemic.
The…
December 2, 2007
It's Sunday but, alas, no rest for me. I'm off on a jet plane (I hope I know when I'll be back again). But it's still important to preach my Sermonette. Too many of you already know the classic George Carlin rant on religion as bullshit (if you don't, you can watch it on YouTube here), but there's…
December 1, 2007
Dr. Margaret Chan, a Hong Kong native, has been at the helm of the World Health Organization (WHO) now for almost a year. The Associated Press (no by-line) has an interesting sketch of her, which includes her penchant for using song as an ice-breaking device in contentious settings. We brought you…
November 30, 2007
If you are like most people you probably aren't alarmed about the dangers of nanotechnology. In fact if you are like most people you probably don't even know what nanotechnology is. I'll resist the temptation to say general knowledge of the emerging technology of the very small is even smaller.…
November 30, 2007
Another report, another story: the world is not ready for a pandemic. Before you click away (you've heard it before) I'll be saying something more about it than just reiterating the dire prognosis if we don't shape up. But first the message, from the UN and the World Bank:
The world remains…
November 29, 2007
It is not news that the Atlanta lawyer who had/didn't have Extremely Drug Resistant TB early in the year didn't infect anyone when he flew -- against advice or was it against orders? -- from Europe back to the US via Canada and through New York despite a no fly (or not?) order from CDC (or DHS?).…
November 29, 2007
Nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) are in the news again. Yesterday was the dust up over Howard Markel and colleagues' JAMA article from last August that appeared in CIDRAP News calling into question some of the historical data on the effectiveness of isolation and quarantine and now it's an…
November 28, 2007
China's insatiable energy needs have made headlines. One of its worst consequences is an increase in the burning of dirty coal. (This is not to imply there is clean coal; there isn't. Clean coal is just a coal industry marketing term.). Coal is said to supply 70% of China's energy needs compared to…
November 28, 2007
A Commentary by John Barry (author of The Great Influenza) in CIDRAP News and accompanying meta-commentary by CIDRAP Director Mike Osterholm highlight an interesting controversy about a JAMA article by Michigan's Howard Markel and colleagues. Markel's article was a detailed compilation of public…
November 27, 2007
Three times we have posted on the arcane topic of manhole covers. On the first it was to ask why manhole covers are round. On the second it was to elaborate on the theme of the first post, with reader assistance, and exhibit a stunning examples of manhole cover art with links to others. On the…
November 27, 2007
A week ago we defended a colleague against attacks from overzealous anti-smoking crusaders when he criticized their patently absurd claim that breathing 30 minutes of second hand smoke in a public place was equivalent heart attack risk to that of a smoker. Some interpreted this as our saying second…