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September 9, 2007
A few days ago we brought you Word from Australia that Osama bin Laden had driven through several high security checkppoints on the way to Bush's hotel in Sydney, Australia. He just wanted to tell him it was "all a misunderstanding." Given the heavy security for Bush's visit, making it through…
September 8, 2007
I'm not a fish ecologist (you noticed?), so maybe there are things about this story I don't get. I'm looking for an explanation, which I assume a knowledgeable ecologist could give me. It seems that a decades long program to restore the endangered and almost extinct greenback cutthroat trout (…
September 7, 2007
Chemical & Engineering News, a publication of the American Chemical Society, has issued a news release about one of their news items. And this is a news piece about their news release about their news item. Think you can remember that? If not, you might want to read their news release about…
September 7, 2007
There's a lot to know about influenza that we don't know. Unfortunately a lot of is things you thought we knew but don't. Like whether there is a risk from influenza virus in drinking water. Admittedly this hasn't been at the top of the list for seasonal flu, since the main reservoir for this virus…
September 6, 2007
Dear Leader is away in Australia, visiting his lapdog, Oz Prime Minister John Howard and attending the Asia-Pacific economic (APEC) summit. At the summit he chatted easily with his soulmates: U.S. President George W. Bush on Thursday told reporters that talks with Chinese President Hu Jintao were "…
September 6, 2007
Australia's severe flu season reminds us, in dramatic fashion, that "regular" (seasonal) influenza can still be a severe disease. It's not just the elderly, but children, too. What about children in the developing world? What would you find if you went into one of Bangladesh's urban slums? We now…
September 5, 2007
Yesterday we did a post on a breaking story about popcorn lung. It's not just workers. Consumers are also at risk, although how much risk is hard to say. Casual consumption of microwave popcorn using the artificial butter flavoring diacetyl is probably not very risky, but day in and day out…
September 5, 2007
What seemed pretty obvious at first, that wild birds could be and were long distance carriers of H5N1 is, like the birds themselves, still up in the air. The problem is that existing data on migrating wild birds has failed to show convincing evidence they are infected: FAO officials last year…
September 4, 2007
The argument about whether bloggers ever do real reporting is not very interesting to us, but suffice it to say there are numerous instances where they do the same thing as journalists, even in the tiny public health blogosphere. A case in point is my colleague. Dr. David Michaels at The Pump…
September 4, 2007
Recently we posted on the paper by scientists at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and University of Washington (Seattle) reporting a new statistical tool for evaluating the likelihood that a cluster of bird flu cases in a small geographic area was spread from person to person or the result of…
September 3, 2007
Some things do change. Mrs. R's favorite labor song. Enjoy:
September 3, 2007
Labor Day, 2007. Arlo Guthrie and Emmy Lou Harris singing a song written by Arlo's father, Woody Guthrie. On January 29, 1948 a plane, carrying 28 Mexican workers crashed in Los Gatos Canyon near Fresno, California, killing all aboard: The crash resulted in the deaths of four Americans and 28…
September 2, 2007
Politics aside, Mrs. R. and I are real Americans in one important way. We like to shop. Not shop as in "buy." We couldn't afford that. Shop as in entertainment. We like each other's company (we've had many years to get used to it), so when we go to a new place we wander in and out of shops, looking…
September 1, 2007
I've been thinking more about the significance of the Dawkins-Harris-Dennett-Hitchens-PZ genre of atheism writing. Matt Nisbet and other folks seem to feel very threatened by it, worrying about an anti-secular backlash. Just saying it that way makes me want to laugh. Oh, those uppity atheists! But…
September 1, 2007
There are a lot of industries that will suffer mightily if there were an influenza pandemic so it's hard to single out any one that will be hit harder. But among the most vulnerable certainly must be the travel industry. At the height of a pandemic the problem is probably moot. By that time even…
August 31, 2007
Because swatting the climate change denier gnats is an endless task, we are glad to help our SciBling John Lynch provide the swatter for yet another boring attempt to breach the walls of scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change. In 2004 Naomi Orestes, a fine historian of science known…
August 31, 2007
A couple of weeks ago CDC's peer reviewed journal, Emerging Infectious Diseases, published online an ahead-of-print paper by Yang et al., "Detecting Human-to-Human Transmission of Avian Influenza A (H5N1)." The paper has now been published in the journal and predictably, it made news. It's an…
August 30, 2007
I don't suppose I can sue somebody for negligence resulting in impairment of my mental health. But if I could, I would surely go after the assholes at the PRISM coalition, an alleged grassroots group (such front groups for industry are often called astroturf groups) whose task in life is to lock up…
August 30, 2007
If you want a good snapshot of how poorly prepared Indonesia is for coping with bird flu, look no further than the Letter column of The Jakarta Post: On Aug. 26 I found a dead wild bird in my yard. I am living in Bali near the area where bird flu related deaths have occurred. Since I was worried…
August 29, 2007
The walking TB problem is in the news again. This time it's not a well to do lawyer from Atlanta but a Mexican born resident of Norcross, Georgia, a healthy appearing teen ager told last Friday he had tuberculosis and would have to undergo treatment. We don't know exactly what he was said to him…
August 29, 2007
This is a public health blog run by an old geezer (or geezers, depending upon how many of us there are), but if you are a crazed gamer with an age in the low double digits (or not), this post is for you. The part for you is below the fold, at the end. But first some background. Despite my age, I'm…
August 28, 2007
I like John Edwards and tend to agree with him on poverty and campaign finance, although his Iraq war opposition is weak and ambiguous. But he's got a lot of company there, unfortunately. The one thing you can say about the Republican candidates is their pro-war stance isn't ambiguous. It is…
August 28, 2007
A recent article in TimesOnline (hat tip RobT) raises an inevitable and interesting question about how we are going to ration scarce high tech medical resources in a pandemic. The article reports on a paper by Canadian scientists on SARS patients indicating that certain patterns of protein…
August 27, 2007
We in public health need all the advocates we can get, so it's heartening to know that a major pharmaceutical company, Allergan, Inc., has hired a big name lobbying firm to "lobby on public health issues": Allergan Inc., which makes eye care products and Botox anti-wrinkle injections, hired McKenna…
August 27, 2007
I'm at the beach and it's hot. It's supposed to be that way at the beach. When I get overheated I head back to the unit, which is air conditioned, and I cool off. Actually, I don't. I stay the same temperature (body temperature), but that aside, it's no problem. But not everyone is so lucky and…
August 26, 2007
I have an admission to make. For the last couple of weeks I have been bootlegging off of whatever available wifi I could find. This has found me out on the porch of our unit, balancing my laptop on a the railing, trying to catch a couple of waves. Sick? Mrs. R. thinks so. It's not that I don't want…
August 26, 2007
I don't mean to pick a fight with a fellow Science Blogger, but I'm afraid I have to. If not a fight, at least register a strenuous remonstrance, if I may frame it that way. The object of my displeasure is Matt Nisbet over at Framing Science, who seems to have a bee in his neurons about what he…
August 25, 2007
The Reveres and spouses are not big moviegoers, although when on vacation we do like to take in a flick. The movie Transformers is not likely to be the one we'd pick, but one thing for sure: whichever one it is won't be shown at one the theaters of the world's largest chain, Regal Entertainment…
August 24, 2007
I'm at the beach and as you might expect there are a lot of seafood restaurants. While I'm not a big fish eater, I do appreciate the really neat kinds of food poisoning you can get from fish. Like scombroid: Scombroid fish poisoning is an acute illness that occurs after eating fish containing high…
August 24, 2007
Pandemic influenza gets its share of headlines but there are other viruses out there that also are good tabloid fodder, most notably Ebola virus which causes Ebola hemorrhagic fever, whose gruesome effects were depicted in Richard Preston's book, The Hot Zone. Ebola has some close relatives in the…