revere
Posts by this author
September 25, 2007
Lots of stories on the wires (e.g., here) about a Nature Medicine paper describing a handheld microfluidic lab-on-a-chip to detect H5N1 inexpensively in less than 30 minutes. It was hard to understand what was involved from the news articles so I retrieved the paper (published online in advance of…
September 24, 2007
I thought the saga of The Harvard Coop would be over once the inanity of its claim that the ISBN numbers of books used in Harvard courses were their intellectual property. The ISBN, or International Standard Book Number, is a 13 digit number and barcode used by publishers to identify books…
September 24, 2007
The National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) is the major source of information about the health of noninstitutionalized Americans -- you and me and our neighbors. Data collection started in 1956 and consists of ongoing data collection and special studies on illness and disability and their trends.…
September 23, 2007
Before the invasion there was cholera in Iraq but at a fairly low level: 30 cases a year reported or about one in a million population. Cholera is entirely preventable with clean water and easily treatable with oral rehydration therapy. But it can also kill a person in less than a day. The bug's…
September 23, 2007
Sometimes you read things in the newspaper that leave you gasping for air. Religious twaddle is a never ending source of this kind of crap, so you'd think I would be immune. The particular pathology I present to you today isn't even near the top of the steaming pile of shit that newspapers print as…
September 22, 2007
The Harvard Cooperative ("The Coop," pronounced like the coop in chicken coop) is a venerable institution whose main branch in Harvard Square is the principal retail outlet for textbooks to Harvard students. Generations have bought their texts and other books there. Like many college bookstores the…
September 21, 2007
I post occasionally on climate change here but other SBers do it much better (e.g., Chris Mooney at The Intersection). When I have posted on it I have neglected to mention the amount of money I make from the climate change issue. The subject just "didn't come up." Well now it has, so honesty…
September 21, 2007
We've talked here fairly often (see, for example, here) that the way and how far influenza virus spreads isn't understood or known precisely. That seems to be a big surprise, not only to the public but to many in the public health community who should know better. That's why I was pleased to see…
September 20, 2007
OJ Simpson is back in the news, following hard on the heels of other celebrities in legal entanglements: Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, Martha Stewart, etc., etc. Yawn. Were they treated more harshly beacuse they were celebrities? Yawn. The other side of the coin, of course, is the privilege of the…
September 20, 2007
For whatever reason, TB control is back on the front burner. TB remains a worldwide scourge and has always had a dedicated cadre of public health professionals battling it. Now they are getting some new ammunition and reinforcements. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is weighing in with a…
September 19, 2007
Biodefense laboratories at Texas universities operated for years without a single reported incident of laboratory acquired infection or even exposure. That is absolutely true and it sounds reassuring and it is similar to biodefense laboratores elsewhere. Don't worry. Be happy. But when it comes to…
September 19, 2007
The bird flu influenza subtype, H5N1, that has been infecting humans with high mortality is the highly pathogenic (HPAI) version of a virus that also exists in a low pathogenic form (LPAI). The high and low path designations refer to effects on poultry, not humans, but only the HPAI versions have…
September 18, 2007
When you use as part of your daily work a unit of measure that Wired magazine lists as among the Best Obscure Units, you know you are in trouble. Thus I found pack-year, one of an epidemiologist's favorite smoking exposure measures listed there along with a couple of other units I knew about. Pack-…
September 18, 2007
10,000 ducks in Guangdong Province in the south of China have died of bird flu and 100,000 more culled in an attempt to stop the spread of the disease. Massive bird flu outbreaks are not exactly a novelty these days but the Chinese incident is noteworthy because it is now reported the ducks were in…
September 17, 2007
More and more places around the world are following the US lead and banning smoking in public places. When they are proposed, we usually hear about all sorts of dire consequences on business from these bans, In the US this hasn't happened to any significant extent and many businesses are reporting…
September 17, 2007
War's travel companion, Disease, is stalking Baghdad. This disease, cholera, is totally preventable and easily treatable under ordinary circumstances. Of course these aren't ordinary circumstances. Thanks to the invasion and the subsequent US occupation and the resistance to it there has been a…
September 16, 2007
I'm tired of hearing people with usually progressive views (like Mark Shields or John Kerry) complain the latest MoveOn ad in the New York Times asking if General Petraeus has Betrayed Us is counter-productive, "alienating those who would otherwise agree with us." It's the same bogus argument we…
September 16, 2007
This little rant has been around for a while, but since it can't be said too often, I'll let Marcus Brigstocke say it again. Seven minutes of Truth:
September 15, 2007
I spend some of my time working with citizen groups from contaminated communities. There are a frightful number of them in the United States, as there are everywhere. The stories are frequently heartbreaking and the polluters heartless. So it's good to remind myself that things could be worse. A…
September 14, 2007
I just watched Dear Leader tell his fellow citizens why we will have to wait until the next President before there is any hope for extricating the country from the quicksand of the Iraq Debacle. It was not a surprise, but no less dismaying for being expected. But I've been dismayed before. Vietnam…
September 14, 2007
&In Europe and North America pets -- what veterinarians call companion animals -- are usually dogs or cats. In other countries (e.g., Korea) dogs are raised for food like livestock. Birds are a sort of cross over creature. Birds as companions are fairly common in Europe and America but they are…
September 13, 2007
Being right isn't all it's cracked up to be. Sometimes I wish I were wrong. But CDC does it to me time and again. On April 14, 2005 I posted on the fiasco involving the distribution as a routine test reagent of a non-contemporary pandemic influenza strain (H2N2, responsible for the 1957 pandemic).…
September 13, 2007
Texas A&M's work on agents of interest to biodefense has its two month suspension continued by CDC because of persistent and extensive violation of safety rules (posts here, here, here, here and here).
The violations alleged by the CDC include the university's inability to account for at least…
September 12, 2007
There are a lot of nasty viruses out there, many with strange names that suggest they are mainly problems for remote sections of the rain forest.Since I don't go to remote sections of the rain forest they have been mostly an object of academic interest for me. One of these viruses is an…
September 12, 2007
The war in Iraq has been going on in earnest since March of 2003, which is about how long the war on bird flu has been going on. Yes, there were some preliminary skirmishes in the bird flu war in 1997, but it wasn't until it burst out of southern China with a vengeance that full scale hostilities…
September 11, 2007
When smoking bans in public places were first broached, some of the fiercest opposition came from bar and restaurant lobbyists who predicted it would be their ruination. In March of this year 2006 Scotland instituted a ban and the rest of the UK on July 1. What's the verdict so far? If you read the…
September 11, 2007
It's September 11, so time to do a "security" post. Sigh. The current dopiness concerns the lessons we can learned for making das Vaterland safe after the recent Atlanta lawyer TB incident. Since learning the wrong lesson seems to be standard operating procedure for both Republicans and Democrats,…
September 10, 2007
I try not to make mistakes on this blog but sometimes I do. When I find out about them, I correct them. But what do I know. I'm only a blogger, not a journalist. I thought you were supposed to correct your mistakes:
Almost half of the articles published by daily newspapers in the US contain one or…
September 10, 2007
In the last five years the Veterans Administration has figured out a way to decrease cancer cases amongst veterans by a lot: 40,000 to 70,000 are the estimates. The breakthrough was initiated by the Bush administration, which has used the same technique to make an impact on other problems, from…
September 9, 2007
Flying on an airplane used to be something special. Now it's just another means of mass transit, with all that implies. So our attention is more and more directed to the unpleasant parts of flying, which, for many is the lousy air quality. Modern pressurized airliners fly high -- very high indeed.…