revere
Posts by this author
April 7, 2007
Our colleagues at our sister site, The Pump Handle, are doing a good job of keeping the public health community aware and apprised of things that often go unnoticed but are of real importance. If TPH isn't one of your daily reads, I'd suggest you make room for it. Yesterday we learned that the Bush…
April 6, 2007
The RAND corporation is one of the country's foremost non-profit consulting companies. Their Reports carry weight. So I was interested to see the announcement of a new Rand panel report on key components of public health emergency preparedness. Emergency preparedness means many things to many…
April 6, 2007
The US only requires meatpackers to test a small fraction of their cows for bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), otherwise known as Mad Cow Disease. Literally. They cannot test a larger fraction. Does that sound stupid? It sounded stupid to a federal judge, too:
The federal government must allow…
April 5, 2007
[A series of posts explaining a paper on the mathematical modeling of the spread of antiviral resistance. Links to other posts in the series by clicking tags, "Math model series" or "Antiviral model series" under Categories, left sidebar. Preliminary post here. Table of contents at end of this post…
April 5, 2007
Bird flu is spreading in poultry in Bangladesh. And Kuwait has had bird flu in its poultry but is hoping its cull of 1.7 million birds has stopped it. But not until four Bangladeshis working on the cull were hospitalized with possible bird flu infection. Isolation was undertaken because of blood…
April 4, 2007
[A series of posts explaining a paper on the mathematical modeling of the spread of antiviral resistance. Links to other posts in the series by clicking tags, "Math model series" or "Antiviral model series" under Categories, left sidebar. Preliminary post here. Table of contents at end of this post…
April 4, 2007
Just as we are preparing to wind up our marathon series of posts on a mathematical model of antiviral resistance, a new paper has appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) with data on antiviral resistance from Japan, the country that uses more Tamiflu and Relenza (the two…
April 3, 2007
[A series of posts explaining a paper on the mathematical modeling of the spread of antiviral resistance. Links to other posts in the series by clicking tags, "Math model series" or "Antiviral model series" under Categories, left sidebar. Preliminary post here. Table of contents at end of this post…
April 3, 2007
I'm an academic, where criticizing the management is common, although sometimes hazardous. I was also a long time department chair so I know what it's like to be on the other end. It's part of the job, both sides. That's not so true in government, even in those agencies where the culture is more…
April 2, 2007
[A series of posts explaining a paper on the mathematical modeling of the spread of antiviral resistance. Links to other posts in the series by clicking tags, "Math model series" or "Antiviral model series" under Categories, left sidebar. Preliminary post here. Table of contents at end of this post…
April 2, 2007
I like the British medical journal, The Lancet. I like it a lot. I read it, subscribed to it and I've published there. More than once. So I sympathize with their terrible dilemma:
Physicians from around the world urged the publisher of The Lancet medical journal to cut its links to weapons sales,…
April 1, 2007
[A series of posts explaining a paper on the mathematical modeling of the spread of antiviral resistance. Links to other posts in the series by clicking tags, "Math model series" or "Antiviral model series" under Categories, left sidebar. Preliminary post here. Table of contents at end of this post…
April 1, 2007
When last we checked the problem of salmonella contaminated peanut butter they had traced it to the ConAgra Peter Pan factory in Sylvester, Georgia. But how could living organisms get into the peanut butter? Last week FDA investigators announced they had found two "environmental positives" in the…
March 31, 2007
[A series of posts explaining a paper on the mathematical modeling of the spread of antiviral resistance. Links to other posts in the series by clicking tags, "Math model series" or "Antiviral model series" under Categories, left sidebar. Preliminary post here. Table of contents at end of this post…
March 30, 2007
[A series of posts explaining a paper on the mathematical modeling of the spread of antiviral resistance. Links to other posts in the series by clicking tags, "Math model series" or "Antiviral model series" under Categories, left sidebar. Preliminary post here. Table of contents at end of this post…
March 30, 2007
Tamiflu side effects have been much in the news and we have concurrently been posting our mega-series on modeling antiviral resistance in influenza control. The two subjects are related in two ways, one obvious (Tamiflu is the main antiviral being stockpiled for influenza control) and one not so…
March 29, 2007
GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) is said to be the second largest pharmaceutical and food company in the world. They make and market an influenza antiviral (Relenza) and an H5N1 vaccine. We trust that they represent their products to the public and to public officials correctly. Maybe we shouldn't. At least…
March 29, 2007
[A series of posts explaining a paper on the mathematical modeling of the spread of antiviral resistance. Links to other posts in the series by clicking tags, "Math model series" or "Antiviral model series" under Categories, left sidebar. Preliminary post here. Table of contents at end of this post…
March 28, 2007
[A series of posts explaining a paper on the mathematical modeling of the spread of antiviral resistance. Links to other posts in the series by clicking tags, "Math model series" or "Antiviral model series" under Categories, left sidebar. Preliminary post here. Table of contents at end of this post…
March 28, 2007
So the vaccine sharing summit in Jakarta is over and Indonesia says they will begin sharing virus again. The proviso is that they can't be shared with pharmaceutical companies until a vaccine-sharing agreement is hammered out with WHO and that will take an estimated 3 months. I'll be surprised if…
March 27, 2007
[A series of posts explaining a paper on the mathematical modeling of the spread of antiviral resistance. Links to other posts in the series by clicking tags, "Math model series" or "Antiviral model series" under Categories, left sidebar. Preliminary post here. Table of contents at end of this post…
March 27, 2007
Indonesia, as usual, presents us with a dilemma. It is one of the least effective nations in dealing with their bird flu problem, exhibiting massive incompetence spiced by corruption. This has helped make them the bird flu epicenter of the world, with more deaths (by a long way) than any other…
March 26, 2007
[A series of posts explaining a paper on the mathematical modeling of the spread of antiviral resistance. Links to other posts in the series by clicking tags, "Math model series" or "Antiviral model series" under Categories, left sidebar. Preliminary post here. Table of contents at end of this post…
March 26, 2007
[Oh, my. Thanks to my readers at CIDRAP (tip of the hat!) I have become aware the story linked below on masks is an old one, something Crof at H5N1 calls a ghost story. The NewsNow aggregator I use has been doing this a lot lately, so I have been alert, but in this case I had it in my head there…
March 25, 2007
[A series of posts explaining a paper on the mathematical modeling of the spread of antiviral resistance. Links to other posts in the series by clicking tags, "Math model series" or "Antiviral model series" under Categories, left sidebar. Preliminary post here. Table of contents at end of this post…
March 25, 2007
My flu wiki partner, fellow blogger and friend Melanie of Just a Bump in the Beltway fame sent me an email on Friday with subject line: The Times They are a Changin'. In the email was a summary of findings from a recent survey of Trends in Political Values and Core Attitudes: 1987-2007 by the Pew…
March 24, 2007
[A series of posts explaining a paper on the mathematical modeling of the spread of antiviral resistance. Links to other posts in the series by clicking tags, "Math model series" or "Antiviral model series" under Categories, left sidebar. Preliminary post here. Table of contents at end of this post…
March 24, 2007
[A series of posts explaining a paper on the mathematical modeling of the spread of antiviral resistance. Links to other posts in the series by clicking tags, "Math model series" or "Antiviral model series" under Categories, left sidebar. Preliminary post here. Table of contents at end of this post…
March 23, 2007
Pregnant Latina women in the Salinas Valley in CAlifornia have pesticides in their bodies. The surrounding farmland is loaded with pesticides. But how is it getting from the land to them? Or is it? Tom McKone and his colleagues at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs set out to find out. It turned out…
March 23, 2007
[A series of posts explaining a paper on the mathematical modeling of the spread of antiviral resistance. Links to other posts in the series by clicking tags, "Math model series" or "Antiviral model series" under Categories, left sidebar. Preliminary post here. Table of contents at end of this post…