revere
Posts by this author
August 23, 2007
If you were an organic farmer you might be a tad pissed if the government came along and sprayed your crop with pesticide without your consent, essentially spoiling it. But that's what happened near Sacramento north of the American River between July 30 and August 1, as the local mosquito control…
August 23, 2007
"Protecting the border" is a battle cry for the most reactionary US politicians but when it comes to flu, they are as unlikely to be successful as they are for people. However it might be the Canadians, who have a functioning public health system, who are most at risk from a surge of US citizens…
August 22, 2007
One of my colleagues (a clinical psychologist) was once asked the difference between a psychiatrist and a psychologist. "You have to understand," he said, "that a psychiatrist doesn't have a PhD." It turns out there is at least one more difference. The professional association of psychiatrists have…
August 22, 2007
[Given our posts (here, here) on the particularly severe flu season in Australia, we thought it useful to remind ourselves that a bad flu season can be really bad -- worse than the 1918 pandemic in some locations. Here is a post we did back in April 2006 about an interesting paper (see link in post…
August 21, 2007
You wonder when they will ever learn -- or IF they will ever learn. In the wake of yesterday's announcement that the Director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, Dr. David Schwartz, will step aside while NIH does an inquiry into allegations of turmoil at the institute and…
August 21, 2007
We keep seeing these discussions about the probability of a pandemic next year. Sometimes they center on the "overdue" for a pandemic notion, sometimes on using available data to give an estimate of the rough chances of a pandemic. In the latter category is this little contretemps in the UK:…
August 20, 2007
As promised, here is a second post on the situation in Australia, currently struggling through a very bad flu season. In the first post I quoted the late epidemiologist Irving Selikoff who referred to statistics as "people with the tears wiped away." Statistical summaries are the stock in trade of…
August 20, 2007
In an email letter sent internally to all National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) personnel, its Director, Dr. David Schwartz, has announced he is temporarily stepping aside while the NIH Director, Dr. Elias Zerhouni, conducts an internal review of NIEHS and the National…
August 20, 2007
This is about the particularly severe flu season being endured by our friends in Australia. Southern hemisphere, so the flu season is in full swing there, the reverse of the northern hemisphere. But "full swing" doesn't quite describe it, so I'm going to do this one in two parts ((all links from…
August 19, 2007
The big pandemic flu vaccine news of the moment has to be The Lancet report that vaccine maker GlaxoSmithKline has been able to get excellent antibody production against H5N1 with a new adjuvanted preparation that contains remarkably little viral antigen. This is important because the currently the…
August 19, 2007
It seems like just a few weeks ago (maybe because it was just a few weeks ago) we brought you the stupidity of the South Carolina couple who saw angels in the clouds. Not that this kind of thing is so uncommon. People have a tendency to organize their sense data into patterns and those patterns…
August 18, 2007
[Another post from two years ago. Everybody is talking universal health care now. Two years ago, nada. Well, almost nada. Below is what we said then (and continue to say, now). But first this, to show the original post is still current:
Americans are living longer than ever, but not as long as…
August 17, 2007
[This is from two years ago. Since I just got through driving 1000 miles to reach a beach with no internet access -- imagine that -- I thought it was appropriate. Or not. Just don't read it while you are driving. Please.]
In the 1930s my uncle got a car that had a radio in it. The family was aghast…
August 17, 2007
I'm not sure which is worse. Pandemic flu preparation which puts most of its eggs (pathogen-free, of course) in the vaccine basket or the one that plans to distribute the non-existent vaccine in a way that it misses the most needy and vulnerable. I guess it's obvious that if the first is bad, the…
August 16, 2007
Either there are more lab accidents in biodefense laboratories or we are hearing about them more (see here, here, here, here, here.). Since there are always lab accident but there is a lot more "biodfense" laboratory work, it is probably both. I think we can look forward to the Bush administration…
August 16, 2007
A new paper in the Annals of Internal Medicine underlines a point we have tried to make multiple times (e.g., see here, here and here). Naive and unthought out therapeutic responses to the idea that bird flu kills via a "cytokine storm" is a bad idea. Cytokine storm is also a common feature of…
August 15, 2007
[Another piece from two years ago, August. Since we recently posted on personal prepping, I thought I'd give you the extreme version.]
We all know from the last election that security is a major preoccupation of the American public. Hell, that theme won the last election for a guy who not only is a…
August 15, 2007
As more and more people take their meals already prepared ("ready to eat" or RTE) from supermarkets and delicatessens, so will more and more people take their pathogens the same way. It's not that the kitchens that prepare RTE food are more dangerous than home kitchens. On the contrary, they are…
August 14, 2007
There may still be some who see the multiply disgraced Paul Wolfowitz as an intellectually hardnosed neoconservative who called them as he saw them (despite being egregiously wrong and morally bankrupt in how he saw them), but the more we see of the real person who obtained a lucrative sinecure and…
August 14, 2007
We write so much here about influenza A virus that you might get the idea it is an especially clever virus, always changing genetically in ways that allow it to perform new and nastier tricks. But other viruses are capable of doing the same thing, and one of them West Nile Virus (WNV), is currently…
August 13, 2007
Bird flu in Indonesia and elsewhere keeps simmering away. Little stuff, here and there. Constant noise, so much so you wonder if you will hear the signal, if and when it sounds. Will it suddenly become so loud it is unmistakable? Or will it be there, growing louder and louder until everyone can…
August 13, 2007
Another food recall, although this one is for spoilage:
Kraft Foods voluntarily recalled their Knudsen cottage cheese in seven states, but told consumers not to worry: the affected cheese isn't making people sick, it just doesn't taste right.
The cartons affected include nonfat, low fat and small…
August 12, 2007
Another press release on a vaccine breakthrough from NIH. This one allegedly predicts the mutations that will result in enhanced transmissibility. Just published as a paper in the journal Science, the focus was on mutations of the HA protein (the "H" part of H5N1) that are related to binding to…
August 12, 2007
Everyone knows Fred Phelps is a vile, obnoxious, cruel and probably psychopathic Christofascist (one of the well known subdivisions of the worldwide fascist movement, which includes Islamofascists, Judeofascists, Hindufascists and many other religiofascists; it is an ecumenical movement, which even…
August 11, 2007
We accidentally put up Sunday's Sermonette this morning (Saturday) but now I've moved it to its proper place on Sunday (tomorrow). This happened because the Reveres are on the road (literally) headed for the beach for a few weeks and I wrote the Sermonette late at night after driving all day. At…
August 11, 2007
If the Chinese team in the 2008 Olympics works half as hard as its government to perform spectacular and intuition-defying acrobatics, it should have the gold Medal sewed up. Consider the latest in the "China is taking food safety very, very seriously but it's no big deal" event. China has…
August 10, 2007
We've written a lot about US high containment laboratories for potential biowarfare agents and extremely dangerous pathogens for which there is no vaccine or cure. But the UK likes to build these labs, too. In fact they have five of them. Where? Nah, nah. The UK's Health and Safety Executive is not…
August 10, 2007
The turkeys were doomed anyway, so the discovery they had a "mild strain of bird flu" didn't seal their fate, which had already been hermetically sealed. The birds showed no sign of illness. The evidence for infection came from finding the presence of antibodies to the low pathogenic strain prior…
August 9, 2007
For all you Second Amendment-is-the-most-precious-freedom-we-have folks out there, take heart. We are spreading freedom in Iraq:
The US military cannot account for 190,000 AK-47 assault rifles and pistols given to the Iraqi security forces, an official US report says.
The Government Accountability…
August 9, 2007
We've written here frequently about the ineffectiveness of quarantine for stopping the spread of influenza, but now a piece comes out in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) that claims quarantine was an effective mitigation method for influenza in 1918. Time Magazine, for example…