revere
Posts by this author
July 9, 2007
CIDRAP had an interesting story about some Stanford undergraduates who designed a local pandemic flu hotline staffed by home-based volunteers. The idea emerged from a course in innovation and "entrepreneurship." The course was designed to teach students the rudiments of taking an idea of social…
July 8, 2007
Some federal money ($430 million) for pandemic preparedness is now being released to help states and communities "to respond to bioterror attacks, infectious disease, and natural disasters that may cause mass casualties." The bulk of federal pan flu money has been for procurement of vaccines and…
July 8, 2007
The only triple pun I know is in a stanza from a Pete Seeger song, Passing Through:
I saw Adam leave the garden
With an apple in his hand,
I said, "Now you're out
What are you gonna do?
Plant some crops and pray for rain,
Maybe raise a little Cain,
I'm an orphan and I'm only passing through." (…
July 7, 2007
Prepping for bird flu isn't a very good excuse. Excuse for what? Being a racist pig:
A former British National Party member from Lancashire accused of plotting to make bombs from chemicals he bought on the internet has claimed the substances were for cleaning his false teeth and unblocking drains.…
July 6, 2007
If you live in the US pay taxes and some of those taxes go to support important basic research into the causes of disease. Most of that research is disbursed through an elaborate peer-reviewed granting system at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The point of doing that research is to tell…
July 6, 2007
France, Germany, the Czech Republic and possibly Austria are the latest EU countries to have a recurrence of H5N1 (bird flu) in wild birds or domestic poultry. Last year also saw many EU countries afflicted, but until the UK turkey outbreak in February (see here, here, here and here) some hoped it…
July 5, 2007
I'd rather have a governor that said the right things about the environment, even if he acted to undercut his self-proclaimed goals, than one who said the most reactionary, retrograde and ignorant things. But why should I have to choose? Take Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of California who has…
July 5, 2007
There was a story about prepping for a pandemic in the Washington Post a couple of weeks ago I made note of but didn't get to commenting on. Now's my chance.
When Alexandrians opened their June FYI newsletter, out slipped a slick brochure with a photo of a stern-faced crowd staring out from the…
July 4, 2007
A lot of Republicans have claimed public discontent over the War in Iraq is a creature of a press out to distort the "successes" of a Noble Crusade. The President himself has said things along this line. So has Whitehouse Press Secretary Tony Snow. We expect governments and their toadies to blame…
July 4, 2007
It now turns out that the XDR-TB case which caused such an uproar last month (see our posts here) wasn't XDR-TB at all but MDR-TB, a treatable form of the disease:
Andrew Speaker was diagnosed in May with extensively drug resistant TB, based on an analysis of a sample taken in March by the U.S.…
July 3, 2007
A year may not seem like a long time, but everything's relative. For Texas A&M University a year was 51 weeks too long since they were required to report potential breaches of laboratory safety protections in the federally financed biodefense lab they ran within seven days. This "failure to…
July 3, 2007
Influenza is primarily a disease of birds but other animals, including mammals, can be infected. Humans are mammals, of course, and we know humans get flu. But there are 144 different subtypes of influenza A and mostly they infect birds. When H5N1 jumped from birds to humans in Hong Kong in 1997 it…
July 2, 2007
Calories are a measure of heat. A small calorie is the amount of heat it takes to raise a gram of water from 3.5 degrees centigrade to 4.5 degrees centigrade. A large Calorie (capital C, also called a kilocalorie) is the amount of heat it takes to raise a kilogram of water (2.2 lbs) from 3.5o C. to…
July 2, 2007
The New Scientist has a story this week asking whether flu vaccines really protects the elderly. It's not a new question. Careful epidemiological analyses of national mortality data has seemed to show no change in mortality amongst the elderly when vaccination for seasonal influenza ramped up…
July 1, 2007
The folks who sell carbon monoxide monitors use the phrase "a-colorless-odorless-gas-that-can-kill-you-in-your-sleep" as if it were one word. I guess they use it often enough that it is one word to them. In fact people do die from carbon monoxide, around 500 every year. A sign of monoxide poisoning…
July 1, 2007
Suppose you had a dog and, mirabile dictu, you found he was able to do mathematics? What would you thnk?
Stan Tuten held up a board and scribbled down a basic algebra problem:
If a=2, and b=3, what is axb-1?
Micah, a terrier mix with penetrating eyes like black molasses, glanced at the board.
"…
June 30, 2007
The British Medical Journal is an odd thing. I was very impressed when they went Open Access a few years ago, only to be disappointed when they stopped, even though their new editor, Fiona Godlee, came over from the world's leading Open Access publisher of medical journals, BioMed Central. Recently…
June 29, 2007
The Republican wannabees are all making their pilgrimages to a single institution of Higher Learning, these days. Regent University. And why not. As Rudi Giuliani said the other day to the faculty and students there: "The Amount Of Influence You Have Is Really, Really Terrific." Regent University…
June 29, 2007
Emerging infectious diseases don't appear out of thin air. Mostly (75%), they come from animals. In the language of science, they are zoonoses. So veterinary pathologists see themselves on the front line of early warning against emerging disease and runaway pandemic disease. Consider bird flu:
So…
June 28, 2007
Since I'm a professor I notice stories about professor's rights. I'm all for having my rights. But there are some rights I don't think professors need to have or should have:
The Nevada System of Higher Education's Board of Regents has endorsed a plan that would encourage faculty and staff members…
June 28, 2007
You can't look at the bird flu news without seeing a new outbreak somewhere, whether it's in Bangladesh, Ghana, Togo, the Czech Republic, or Germany, or of course the old standbys, Vietnam, Indonesia and Eqypt. Lots of it around and I didn't give anywhere near the whole list. So it's curious to…
June 27, 2007
I hope the Democrats are successful in stopping the Iraq atrocity. Out of Iraq. Now. But I must once again disagree -- strongly disagree -- with the notion that Iraq has distracted us from the "real" war against terrorism, the one in Afghanistan. This is a talking point of virtually all the…
June 27, 2007
Q-fever is an acute febrile disease which presents, as do so many infectious diseases, with "flu-like symptoms." It isn't cause by a flu virus, however, or any virus. It's caused by a bacterium, Coxiella burnetii. It is class B biowarfare agent, meant to cause debilitating illness amongst its…
June 26, 2007
Many years ago a strange organism appeared outside a branch of Barclays Bank north of London. The first member of the public to encounter it in the wild was an actor from a TV series. We know how old it is from documentary evidence, but if we didn't we could still carbon date it. Carbon dating uses…
June 26, 2007
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) may be the most incompetent and dysfunctional in the federal government (Katrina is one example; but only one). DHS also has a very expansive view of its role. Almost everything is a matter of homeland security. That includes epidemic disease, where there…
June 25, 2007
It is infuriating how stodgy biomedical sciences are in terms of information sharing. It's not clear how much of this is bred of inherent conservatism, the pressures of a very competitive field or just plain technobackwardness. But while mathematics and physics have had preprint servers for years,…
June 25, 2007
For a long time I (and many others) were of the opinion that the reported deaths from H5N1 and the extraordinaraily high Case Fatality Ratio (CFR; proportion of all infections that end fatally) was an over estimate due to underascertainment of infections that were mild, inapparent or just…
June 24, 2007
I just learned via Ben Cohen at World's Fair that George Bush has joined the anti-war movement. Of course I'll believe it when I see it, but he is saying the right things:
"Destroying human life to save human life is just not ethical." (President George Bush on his Saturday radio broadcast)
I don't…
June 24, 2007
There's been a bit of a buzz about a paper by Australian researcher Jennifer McKimm-Breschkin at the Toronto flu meetings last week. McKimm-Breschkin told the gathering of 1500 flu obsessed scientists just what they didn't want to hear: that she and her colleagues had evidence from the laboratory…
June 24, 2007
Epicurus' old questions are yet to be answered. Is [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil? -- David Hume, quoted in Konner, The Atheist's Bible
The tremendous number of…