revere
Posts by this author
February 3, 2007
CDC held a full scale bird flu drill yesterday and allowed reporters to watch (h/t ch). After some reported what they saw, one wonders if they will do it again. Not that they finished the drill, which was stopped halfway because Atlanta had an ice storm. I hope this doesn't happen during a real…
February 2, 2007
I'm sure you've read about this on other blogs (what? you read other blogs?), but it is just too juicy and too emblematic not to comment on here. Well, I won't actually comment on it. It is self-parodying:
Indonesia claimed a major victory in the fight against bird flu Thursday, saying the heart of…
February 2, 2007
If H5N1 is going to "go pandemic" it has to be transmissible from person to person. This occurs, but rarely. Why? The 1918 virus was not only lethal but easily transmissible. What's the difference between the 1918 pandemic strain and all the H5N1 strains we've seen so far?
One of the theories was…
February 1, 2007
Most readers probably never gave much thought to tissue culture, the laboratory technique where cells or tissues are grown in flasks or other containers separated from the organism of origin. One of the reasons for doing this is to grow viruses, since a virus needs a host cell to replicate. It can'…
February 1, 2007
It's flu season. Human flu, that is. Also, it seems, flu in poultry. So if someone comes down with high fever, aches and pains and a cough in an area where there is H5N1 in poultry, is it likely to be bird flu? The answer, so far, is "No." The reason is fairly straightforward, although this is…
January 31, 2007
Lecturers, even at a university like Harvard, are pretty far down the food chain. Even if, like Linda Bilmes an economist at Harvard's Kennedy School, you were once an Assistant Secretary of Commerce in the Clinton Administration and co-authored a paper recently with a Nobel Laureate economist.…
January 31, 2007
Our Wiki partner DemFromCT has this post at DailyKos this morning about a CDC media phone conference/advisory tomorrow on its new Public Service Announcements (PSA) on pandemic flu and its guidelines on community measures that can be taken in the absence of a vaccine. This is the kind of ratcheting…
January 31, 2007
Exploration with new vaccine technologies is moving forward rapidly, although given the usual pace of the science and then necessary tests for safety and efficacy it isn't likely we will have a bird flu vaccine sooner than two or three years from now. Maybe that's enough time. Maybe it isn't. It…
January 30, 2007
Many Americans were outraged when they learned the fur collar on their new made-in-China coat was really cat fur or dog fur. I guess the outrage at the sacrifice of what we know as a companion animal (aka pet) for clothing is understandable. If we kept mink or fox as pets it might elicit the same…
January 30, 2007
I am going through the latest mathematical model papers on the spread of influenza on the air travel network and another on antiviral resistance, both published last week in PLoS Medicine. It's taking me a while. They are not instant reads and I am busy at work. The air travel paper by Colizza et…
January 29, 2007
Having spent several posts on the science behind Polonium-210 (here, here, here), we thought we'd bring you a follow up on the case to date. The murder weapon seems to be a pot of tea. How very English:
British officials say police have cracked the murder-by-poison case of former spy Alexander…
January 29, 2007
Having taken on the American Chemical Society the other day, why stop there. Let's talk about the American Chemistry Council, the ACC (neé the Manufacturing Chemists' Association, then the Chemical Manufacturers Association and now ACC). And bird flu. Yes, bird flu. The ACC is a trade association…
January 28, 2007
Yesterday we took note of the mirror image of absenteeism, presenteeism. The concern here is that people will show up to work sick and if they are infectious, spread influenza or whatever else is going around. As we noted people have various reasons for working sick, not the least of which is that…
January 28, 2007
Let's identify the enemy correctly. In a democracy, the enemy is cynicism. All enemies of democracy want you to be cynical about whether you can affect anything your government does. Cynicism is deeply anti-democratic. Even on a day where we gathered by tens or hundreds of thousands to tell our…
January 27, 2007
Whenever the topic of sick leave comes up, employers are quick to raise the specter of malingering to get out of work. But a recent report on CNN suggests that showing up when sick may be costing plenty, too. "Presenteeism" is not just a financial problem but a public health one particularly…
January 26, 2007
When three separate people send you an article in Nature it gets your attention. Since I have a paid subscription to Nature, my attention was ready to be grabbed anyway, but I hadn't yet read this story so a tip of the hat to my informants. I also have paid personal subscriptions to Science and a…
January 26, 2007
It seems like just yesterday the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization was saying that the current resurgence of bird flu is not as bad as last year when it burst out of Asia and extended itself into 40 countries or so. It wasn't yesterday. It was Monday. Enough time for that judgment to look a…
January 25, 2007
Stories like this really interest me, so a special thanks to Jody Lanard who sent it along. It's about those gloves they wear while making you a sandwich at the deli or a fast food joint. You know the ones. The disposable plastic kind. Disposable so you can change them often and throw them away.…
January 25, 2007
We spend a lot of time on bird flu here because, as I have explained, it is a useful lens through which to look at the void in public health leadership as well as preparedness issues of the system that allegedly protects us from bird flu and much else. We don't spend all this time on bird flu…
January 24, 2007
Tonight The Reveres are putting on their party clothes and headed for Jordan Barab's place, Confined Space. Doors open from 9:00 pm to 11:00 pm, Eastern Standard Time.
Truthfully, this party is also a wake, because Jordan is closing up shop tonight and has invited everyone over (that means you, too…
January 24, 2007
Bird flu is a disease of birds, so how are the birds doing this year? If you just read the headlines, you might be a bit confused. Unfortunately reading the stories won't clear things up:
Many global bird flu outbreaks unreported -FAO
Many countries are doing a better job fighting the H5N1 bird…
January 23, 2007
The University of California Regents (their Board of Trustees) is facing a thorny issue: should researchers in the University of California system be banned from taking research support from the tobacco industry? Two conflicting imperatives, one, unfettered freedom to pursue research wherever it…
January 23, 2007
Dr. Margaret Chan has been on the job at WHO for about a month. So far so good. Two weeks ago she named Dr. Anarfi Asamoa-Baah as WHO's Deputy-Director General. I don't know him, myself, but those who do (and whose judgment I trust) have nothing but the highest praise for him, describing him as "…
January 22, 2007
Tomorrow we will be "treated" to the annual State of the Union lie-fest, with Liar-in-Chief George W. Bush reportedly to tell us we need a massive commitment to ethanol to break our oil addiction. Ethanol is the oil man's methadone, it seems. It doesn't sound like we'll be hearing about…
January 22, 2007
A little noticed paper in CDC's Emerging Infectious Diseases takes us back to a year ago when dead and dying birds infected with H5N1 were first found near water in Germany, Slovenia and Austria. In mid February 2006 a sick swan picked up from a river in Austria was taken to an animal shelter in…
January 21, 2007
Half of us in the US now live in cities, towns or states that ban smoking in public places, including restaurants and bars (it's nice to be more enlightened than Europe in at least a few things):
Seven states and 116 communities enacted tough smoke-free laws last year, bringing the total number to…
January 21, 2007
When newspaper columnist Art Buchwald died on Wednesday I had to laugh. Forgive me if this shocks you, but he always made me laugh, even when he died. In an interview on PBS's Newshour, Jeffrey Brown played a video of Buchwald reading the first sentence he would write if he were to write his…
January 20, 2007
Reading the comments here can be both exhilarating and dismaying. The peevishness I see about WHO falls into the dismaying category. People who follow bird flu have a tendency to get crotchety with WHO over some of its more flagrant gaffes and obvious attempts at spinning, although which way the…
January 19, 2007
Brought to you bereft of comment:
Source: New York Times, January 17, 2007 (h/t Attack Rate)
January 19, 2007
The news that H5N1 viruses isolated from an uncle and niece in Egypt who died in December has been found to carry a genetic change suggestive of resistance to the main antiviral drug oseltamivir (Tamiflu) headlined the H5N1 newswires yesterday. Specifically, WHO announced that genetic sequencing…