revere

Obama's election opened Pandora's Box and one of the things that flew out was Hope. No good change comes without Hope as one of its wellsprings. There is much justified anger at Obama's War on Afghanistan. You've seen it here and you'll see more of it as the Afghanistan debacle continues to take…

Red wine has been touted for its health benefits but these don't seem to extend to warding off swine flu. The virology laboratory in Bordeaux in the southwest of France tested via RT-PCR over 1200 nasopharyngeal swabs between May 1 and the first week in October and found 186 positive for the new…

It would take us too far afield to describe how the following reached me (far afield but entertaining; sorry, no dice, just a hat tip to SR). Whatever its provenance, it concerns matters of medical importance as framed by one of the better known doctors in the country, Dr. Laura Schlesinger (or as…

I usually choose music clips featuring the performer and the song. I prefer live performances. I don't like videos with graphic or powerful images because they often distract from the music and I am powerfully affected by the music itself. But this is an exception in two ways. First, this is…

We complain when there isn't enough swine flu vaccine and we complain when our health departments don't count all the cases. It's probably good so many people are out of work and can't eat in restaurants, because they aren't getting inspected because all available staff are trying to deal with the…

President Obama made his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech yesterday. Full of irony, thoughtful, analytic, nuanced, humble. So much more elegant than George Bush could ever hope to do. Other than that, same bottom line, only now it's the Obama Doctrine, dressed up. I'm not buying it. I'm as angry…

I got an email yesterday about "a disturbing undercover video showing sick and injured pigs being dragged, beaten, pushed with forklifts and shocked with electric prods by workers to get them onto slaughterhouse kill floors." I'm glad I didn't see it as the whole thing disturbs me enough. I'm not a…

We're saving lives on the battlefield. Lives that would have been lost in previous wars. That's good. War takes too many lives. But there are ways to take lives that don't involve killing someone. And we're taking a lot of lives that way, many more than before. Here's Liam Clancy with the great…

The other day the British Medical Journal (BMJ) published a clutch of articles about whether Tamiflu was as useful a drug as some have touted. I read the main article, another one of the Cochrane Collaborative meta-analyses of the studies they deem useful about any particular subject, and it didn't…

We're talking about sending 30,000 more soldiers to Afghanistan. We're not talking about the ones that are coming home. I used to work for the VA. There's lots to talk about. Let's start now:

Long time readers may have noticed that the subject of West Nile Virus (WNV) pops up periodically here (and here, here, here, here, here). It's more than a passing fancy. I was professionally involved in public health measures around West Nile after its introduction to the US in 1999 and have…

Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, testified in Congress yesterday. Not surprisingly he said what Generals always say: "we" can win. Back in 1963 Pete Seeger gave a concert in Melbourne, Australia. If you never saw him in concert, this is what he was always like. The…

An interesting blog post came my way yesterday about The Legend of the Boiling Frog. The gist of the post was that the legend was just that: urban (or science) legend. The post apparently started out with a query to a noted biologist who studies amphibians (I originally wrote, "a noted amphibian…

The only flowers growing in Afghanistan seem to be poppies. When will we ever learn?

Any concerns about the current swine flu vaccine inevitably bring up the swine flu episode of 1976. This is not 1976. For starters, this year we have a bona fide pandemic and in 1976 the virus never got out of Fort Dix, NJ. That in itself is a game changer. If there are any risks from a vaccine (…

Yesterday we were all Universal Soldiers. Today this one's not marching any more. Phil Ochs:

Like David Rind over at Evidence in Medicine I'm a consumer of statistics, not a statistician. However as an epidemiologist my viewpoint is sometimes a bit different from a clinician's. As a pragmatic consumer, Rind resists being pegged as a frequentist or a Bayesian or any other dogmatic…

Whether religion is related to survival or not is obviously highly context dependent. It's negatively correlated with survival for minorities in intolerant societies. So why do religious identities persist? I would claim there is evidence they aren't persisting, but the basic question is not…

. . . we put an end to war:

If you are a publishing scientist this will hit home. It's making the rounds of the science community, so you may have seen it, but if you haven't, it's hilarious. In fact it's still hilarious after the third and fourth times through. Warning: If you are sensitive about Hitler associated parodies…

We've just received news that last night the Senate unanimously confirmed our friend and colleague, Dr. David Michaels as an Assistant Secretary of Labor -- specifically, Director of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). He starts sometime next week. Now the top two posts (…

Marilyn Mann pointed me to an interesting post by David Rind over at Evidence in Medicine (thanks!). It's a follow-on to an earlier post of his about the importance of plausibility in interpreting medical literature, a subject that deserves a post of its own. In fact the piece at issue, "HIV…

Not the first time for this one. But some things have to be done again:

Frequent readers here know we are fascinated with the similarities between computer viruses and real viruses. Both use their unwittingly infected hosts (computers or host cells) to make copies of themselves and in the process can cause varying degrees of sickness. It's hard to give any solid…

From a reader in Western Massachusetts: 10 Reasons to Oppose the Escalation of War in Afghanistan Human cost of war: Soldier and civilian deaths and injuries have been escalating each year since 2001. Nearly 1000 U.S. soldiers have been killed while 32,000 Afghan civilians have died as a result…

While I was otherwise occupied with family matters last week there was news on the flu front that got past me. Declan Butler at Nature News reported on the extensive efforts to get a handle on the prevalence of swine flu infection in various populations by looking for evidence the immune system has…

What else is there to say? Lyndon Johnson may have done a powerful amount of good for civil rights but his legacy went down the Vietnam toilet. He was a big fool who listened to the wrong people, people who told him to push on. Barack Obama seems to be another Big Fool: Pete Seeger, singing on…

I don't know what happened in the Ukraine regarding swine flu (or some other illness) and without any hard facts we refrained from speculating on it (we did post once on the lack of clarity and WHO's reponse). We still don't know what to say about what did or didn't happen, although it appears…

Swine flu started in pigs (although we don't exactly when or where), adapted to and passed to humans who returned the favor and passed it back to pig herds. Then we heard that turkeys in Chile had contracted the virus, followed by ferrets and a house cat. We can infect animals cross species with…