revere
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Thailand wants to provide free medicines for drugs and heart disease to its poorest citizens. That sounds good to me. Apparently my government doesn't agree:
Thailand's Public Health Minister said U.S. trade officials didn't relent on their opposition to his plan to copy drugs made by companies…
A new experiment in flu communications was noted yesterday by my wiki partner and fellow blogger (The Next Hurrah) DemFromCT over at the mega-blog, DailyKos:
Recognizing the need for people to take pandemic flu preparations more seriously, and recognizing that blogging is a powerful and effective…
The word "vaccine" comes from the Latin word for cow (vacca), as many people know. Infecting people with cowpox (whose medical name is now vaccinia) cross protected them against smallpox, a piece of folk knowledge exploited by Jenner in 1796, when he introduced the practice of inoculating people…
Sometimes it's good to have a "coordinated message" and sometimes it isn't. The UN agencies dealing with bird flu certainly don't have a coordinated message and that's just fine with me. I don't trust anybody to have the right "message" and we're better served by each agency calling it as they see…
I really like this story, which I got from Medgadget (hat tip). It's about a new product, designed by a student, Mr. Edwin Yau of the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia. It was the winner of the (Australian) Dyson Design Awards, and it looks like it deserved it.
Mr. Yau's design for the…
One of the enduring scientific mysteries about influenza is what causes its marked seasonal pattern. A new paper in the Journal of Virology provides a useful mini-review of the many theories. [PubMed says its free online, but it seems to be behind a subscription firewall; maybe that will change.…
Indonesia's Health Minister, Siti Fadilah Supari, has joined WHO's Executive Board.
The Detikcom news website reports Siti Fadilah Supari has been elected unanimously during the 60th World Health Assembly meeting in Geneva,
The health minister says the nomination represents world recognition and…
Mutatis mutandis is a Latin phrase used by philosophers to indicate that an argument made in one circumstance carries over to another, "the necessary changes having been made."
Most of us don't know much about Sikhs, which is why this dispute, which has escalated into violence and civil disorder in…
Influenza is primarily a disease of birds. Most emerging infectious diseases in humans are started out as diseases of animals, what are called zoonoses. We worry about zoonoses for that reason. It is one of the hardwired tendencies of any species to think of their own survival first -- that's…
One difference between city dwellers in bird flu afflicted areas like Indonesia and southeast asia and the US is that many of the former keep poultry as companion animals (aka, pets) or sources of protein (eggs, meat). But some people in the US think it sounds like a pretty good idea:
Last year,…
WHO's Director General is talking tough, but is she talking tough to the right people? We don't know, but we can keep our eye open for results:
Addressing concerns raised by developing countries such as Indonesia, Chan said she was committed to finding ways of distributing potentially life-saving…
Jerry Falwell is no more. I won't mourn him, but I won't rejoice either. I always thought it a bit creepy to be glad when someone dies, or if not creepy, unseemly. Anyway, there are plenty more where he came from, wherever that is.
Like Pastor Rick Warren, televangelist of the huge California…
"Promise them anything, but give them Arpege" was a famous perfume ad campaign of the 1960s. Indonesia is free with promises, but what it is actually handing out doesn't smell like Arpege. After promising (for at least the third time since January) to resume sharing of viral isolates, we find only…
The squabble about viral isolates originating within the borders of Indonesia notwithstanding, the simple fact is that if there were a pandemic there is only a fraction of the needed productive vaccine capacity necessary globally. What fraction? Good question.
The earth is home to 6 billion people…
News on the benzene-in-softdrinks front (for background see here, here, here, here, here and the Environmental Working Group site). The dominoes are starting to fall and the first was a big one, Coca Cola:
Consumer lawyers and The Coca-Cola Company announced today a legal settlement involving…
Indonesia has just registered its 76th death and 95th case of bird flu, making it the country with more of each than any other nation. Not that you would know it by looking at the current WHO count of confirmed cases. That's because Indonesia hasn't sent WHO any viral isolates for confirmation…
You might wonder what this video (hat tip Boingboing) has to do with bird flu. Nothing. Except this. If this guy and another 40% of his buddies are out sick, who's going to do his job if the high voltage lines go down in an ice or wind storm. I'd like to think I'd help sick people. But this? Forget…
Taxes, national service, diplomacy. A far cry from immunology and virology. Unless you are a blogger or interested in words. Then you get to bring them together.
First, taxes and national service. In Rome of old, these were things you owed to the Republic (as opposed to the Rome of today, the…
Nebraska is a pretty red state (meaning Republican and conservative, not lefty as it did in my youth). All the statewide office holders are Republicans except for junior Senator Ben Nelson who might as well be a Republican. The state went two to one for Bush in 2004. Two to one. This is God's…
Suppose there were a stadium built with too few bathrooms (hard to imagine?). As the place became more popular, say 26% more people gathering there, 9% of the bathrooms disappeared and there were too few plumbers to keep them working. Suppose, too, that even though there are more people coming to…
The problem of melamine in the food chain continues to be discussed, so we thought we'd do a follow-up of our earlier post. The mechanism whereby melamine, or melamine plus some other factor, or something else entirely is the cause of pet deaths remains unclear. The latest theory is that a co-…
Too hilarious. Mitt Romney, one of the most successful fundraisers of the Republican dopefuls who still can't get any traction even among the right wing Republican base, may be one of the more gullible. No, I guess the three scientific midgets who publicly declared they don't believe in evolution (…
The US military didn't plan for the aftermath of Iraq. You know, controlling the civilian population? So they've learned their lesson. You gotta plan for it:
The US military has begun to plan for a possible avian flu pandemic that could kill as many as three million people in the United States in…
Stories like this always seem to end badly. But they keep happening:
Imported red fire ants have plagued farmers, ranchers and others for decades. Now the reviled pests are facing a bug of their own.
Researchers have pinpointed a naturally occurring virus that kills the ants, which arrived in the U…
The stand-off between Indonesia and the rest of the world over sharing of viral isolates obtained within its borders continues. Indonesia has identified a problem, but in our opinion, has no standing to impose its proffered unworkable solution. Everyone tends to see this from their own particular…
An article by Norwegian researchers in the UK medical journal, The Lancet, takes WHO to task for making issuing guidelines without adequate reference to existing evidence.
The study was conducted by Dr. Andrew Oxman and Dr. Atle Fretheim, of the Norwegian Knowledge Centre for Health Services, and…
Last week another mathematical modeling paper made the newswires. If you wonder how this happens, the answer is that universities and companies have PR departments that put out press releases. Services like ScienceDaily aggregate and package these press releases for journalists and others (like us…
The US government wants to build yet another high containment laboratory to "research" agents of high risk. This one is supposed to replace the aging facility at Plum Island, New York. Maybe your state is one of the ones bidding for this laboratory. You might even have read about it in your local…