revere
Posts by this author
January 3, 2007
Mercury is a neurotoxin. Neurotoxins are bad for developing nervous systems. Therefore . . .
Five "hotspots" of mercury contamination posing a risk to human health have been found in the eastern states of the US and eastern provinces of Canada.
Average mercury concentrations in many of the region'…
January 3, 2007
The other day we observed that through week 51 of 2006 (two weeks ago) flu activity in the US looked about "normal" except for the dominance among subtyped isolates of H1 influenza instead of the more usual H3. I began to wonder how common or uncommon this was and have done a little digging, but…
January 2, 2007
2006, like other years, was a year of revenge killings. Iraq is the poster child for the cycle of violence and counter-violence that seems to have no end but exhaustion of the combatants. But it isn't the only one. The death sentences in the notorious case of the Tripoli 6 and the execution of…
January 2, 2007
Crawford Kilian at the H5N1 blog makes the pertinent observation that the reports of suspected human bird flu in Vietnam have gone into a kind of limbo. He refers to it as "information inertia" because the same reports of the four suspect cases (and possibly two more) have been co-circulating for…
January 1, 2007
Everybody should think of starting a new career once in a while, and New Year's Day seems as good a time as any for US taxpayers to embark on their new jobs as Venture Capitalists. Medgadget, a site that brings us news of advances in medical technology, now tells us about a private Salt Lake City…
January 1, 2007
The Reveres get a lot of emails from folks who think their issue is worthy of mention on Effect Measure. For the most part, they are right, and the only reason for not mentioning them is the time and attention span of The Reveres. One of the privileges of blogging is the blogger gets to set the…
December 31, 2006
What looked like probable human H5N1 in Vietnam with four cases in one family (a mother and three children), may not be, although the circumstances are sufficiently suspicious we prefer to suspend judgment a bit longer before concluding that this was a false alarm. False negatives and false…
December 31, 2006
According to wingnut whacko James Pinkerton, nut case columnist for Newsday, at least one war is going well, these days: the war against The War on Christmas:
So Christmas has survived yet another year.
Yes, there has been a war on Christmas, fought by a few lefty lawyers who managed to buffalo…
December 30, 2006
Indonesia and Nigeria have a couple of things in common. One is bird flu.
So far, both countries have a stubborn endemic infestation of the virus in their poultry, and neither has been successful in bringing it under control. Indonesia also has the distinction of more human fatalities from bird flu…
December 29, 2006
Gerald Ford, 38th President of the United States and the only one not to be elected as either President of Vice President, isn't even in the ground yet but some of him is being resurrected. Over at Gristmill Dave Roberts has an excellent piece on Ford's 1975 State of the Union speech (complete with…
December 29, 2006
The third of the recently diagnosed H5N1 cases in Egypt has now died, bringing that country's total to 18 cases with 10 deaths, the largest outside asia, southeast asia or Indonesia. The case count for 2006 now shows more cases (114) and more deaths (79) than any previous year. And the virus was…
December 28, 2006
I'm not sure why I'm bothering to say this -- again -- but it always seems to be necessary. The horrific oil pipeline explosion in Nigeria that took over 260 lives is now being treated as a possible focus of epidemic disease because of the decaying bodies. Dead bodies in mass casualties do not…
December 28, 2006
Like Indonesia, the Philippines is an archipelago, comprising some 7000 islands of varying size. It is also close to Indonesia, which lies just to the south across the Sulu Sea. Indonesia has more bird flu deaths than any country in the world and the disease is endemic in poultry all over that huge…
December 27, 2006
I don't ordinarily write about health care reform here, partly because it isn't my expertise, partly because other interests come first, partly because others do it much better. But I have been thinking a good deal about what needs to be done for our public health infrastructure and that…
December 27, 2006
Somethings you don't have to keep saying and others bear repeating. This is one that bears repeating because most of us would rather believe we are making progress on combatting avian influenza.
The exemplar in the fight was Vietnam, the country still with the most confirmed human cases (Indonesia…
December 26, 2006
Our SciBling Matt Nisbet over at Framing Science has called our attention to a WaPo piece about Governor Arnold (The Terminator) Schwarzenegger's emergence as one of the most pro-environment state-house chiefs in the nation. The fact that he runs the biggest state with enormous economic clout makes…
December 26, 2006
It is an unconscious assumption of many public health officials, experts and most health educators that The Truth Shall Make you Free. We know it won't, not even in something as simple as understanding what to do and not do about bird flu. A paper this month in CDC's scientific journal, Emerging…
December 25, 2006
Measles is now uncommon in the US, thanks to vaccination. Last year there were only 66 cases. But half of them came from a single, unvaccinated 17 year old who traveled to Romania on a church mission that visited an orphanage. The next day she returned to the US and attended a gathering of other…
December 25, 2006
The trouble with the influenza A/H5N1 virus is that it's a virus and doesn't know it's Christmas and time to take a break. It doesn't know anything because it doesn't think or know or believe or want anything. It just makes copies of itself and that can be done anytime it and a suitable copy…
December 24, 2006
[This is a very long post, a reply to Orac's (my respected SciBling at Respectful Insolence) equally long response to my also long original post that invited him to tell us what he thought separated his brand of medicine from the "alties" he frequently posts about. Probably most of you won't have…
December 24, 2006
It's not just Sunday, but it's Christmas Eve. Time for my annual In Praise of Christmas Sermonette. Because, yes, I am a big fan of Christmas. As a proud member of the godless, I am not a bit embarrassed or chagrined. As far as I'm concerned, it's a lovely secular holiday. I'll explain why, but I…
December 23, 2006
The newswires are humming again with another story of the estimated toll a flu pandemic might exact, if it were as bad as 1918. This time the occasion is a paper just published (.pdf) in the British medical journal, The Lancet, which attempts the most careful estimate yet of the toll of the 1918…
December 22, 2006
The Revolving Door. Round and round she goes, where she stops, no one knows.
On January 15, Dr. Scott Gottlieb leaves the FDA as Deputy Commissioner for Medical and Scientific Affairs, returning to his old haunts at the ultra conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI). Gottlieb was at FDA for…
December 22, 2006
If you were wondering what happened to bird flu, you can ask the people in Vietnam, South Korea and Nigeria. The virus doesn't care if you know where it is or not. It just keeps going about its business, making copies of itself, using whatever hosts are around whose genetic and protein copy…
December 21, 2006
Americans have never been good at saving. Especially, "saving themselves for marriage."
Almost all Americans have sex before marrying, according to premarital sex research that shows such behavior is the norm in the U.S. and has been for the past 50 years.
The new study shows that by age 20, 75% of…
December 21, 2006
This week President Bush signed the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act (S. 3678). It has generally gotten favorable reviews from public health professionals concerned with preparedness, including the Clinicians Biosecurity Network and The Trust for America's Health. We've taken a look, too,…
December 20, 2006
A Boston man, the head of an elite Anti Terrorist Unit, has become the first person ever charged by the US Department of Justice with committing torture abroad. Charles "Chuckie" Taylor is being held in Miami. Surprised? Didn't think the US would move against one of its own citizens for flagrant…
December 20, 2006
Vietnam is once again reporting bird flu in chickens and ducks after no reports in poultry or humans since November of last year. I have not posted what I have been thinking during this lull, because I had no evidence to support it. But in truth I have suspected the virus has been quietly…
December 19, 2006
Science and justice have been on trial in Libya and both have lost. Today a Libyan court again condemned five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor to death by firing squad after a retrial widely seen as unfair because it excluded exculpatory scientific evidence (see here and here and links…
December 19, 2006
I've debated (with myself) whether to post anything about disgraced columnist Michael Fumento's rantings that bird flu was a "Chicken Little" story (literally: it's entitled, "Chicken Littles were Wrong"). It was published in the far right rag, Weekly Standard, where Science is a dimunutive figure…