revere
Posts by this author
November 2, 2006
Contrary to expectation, the trial of the five Bulgarian nurses and one Palestinian doctor for capital crimes in a Libyan court did not conclude yesterday but was continued until November 4 to allow the prosecutors to answer arguments by the defense that Libyan authorities have framed the Tripoli…
November 2, 2006
[This is the last post in a series about viral and cell surface glycoproteins and their role in the influenza story. It's a slightly updated series from the archives on the old site. Links to all four posts: part I, part II, part III, part IV]
In the first three posts of this series we have given…
November 1, 2006
The Chinese news agency Xinhua reported last week that scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology found H5N1 in the feces of sparrow, non-migratory urban birds two years ago (via Reuters). The brief news report only says the discovery followed an outbreak among poultry in nearby Henan province.…
November 1, 2006
[This is the third in a reprise from the archives about some of the science of the influenza virus. Links to all four posts: part I, part II, part III, part IV]
An influenza virus does only one thing: tries to make many copies of itself. And it does it poorly, although prolifically. Instead of…
October 31, 2006
Another vaccine "story" makes the wires, this time from Dynavax, a Berkeley biotech company. The story is pretty typical of the genre:
Drug companies typically design their seasonal flu vaccines to generate antibodies that neutralize two proteins, hemagglutinin and neuraminidase, on flu viruses.…
October 31, 2006
[This is the second installment from the archives of a series of posts giving some scientific background on the influenza virus, in this case the terminology basics on viral receptors. Technical but not beyond the range of most well educated readers. Links to all four posts: part I, part II, part…
October 30, 2006
It sounds reasonable at first. If hospitals and clinics are going to be overwhelmed in a flu pandemic, prepare to care for sick family members at home.
But what if there's no one to care for you at home? That's the position of the one in four Americans who live alone. Even for those that have…
October 30, 2006
[Back in January we did a series of posts on the old site giving some background science on the influenza virus for the general reader. The Reveres are traveling (for a change) and so we thought it was an appropriate time to dig around in the old archives and update some of the posts thought…
October 29, 2006
The US midterm elections have a nasty side, but so does another, less visible election, that for Director General of the World Health Organization. Thirteen candidates are vying for the position left vacant by the untimely death of Lee Jong-Wook in May. And the politicking is said to be fierce.
One…
October 29, 2006
Atheism is certainly a phenomenon in the book market. I can't remember when books about godlessness made so much news and sold so well, although of course I wasn't around when The Great Agnostic Robert Green Ingersoll lectured to huge audiences in the late nineteenth century. Whatever. I'm happy to…
October 28, 2006
I'm guessing few of you have heard of the physician, Robert Mayer. After all, he lived more than 150 years ago. Yet he is a discoverer of one of Nature's great laws, the First Law of Thermodynamics (otherwise known as Conservation of Energy). A strange topic for this site? My attention was drawn to…
October 27, 2006
"First they came for the Socialists, and I didn't speak up, because I wasn't a Socialist... Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up, because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak up for me." (Martin Niemoller)
The trial of the Tripoli Six is set to…
October 27, 2006
A letter from Philip Mortimer of the UK's Health Protection Agency to the CDC journal, Emerging Infectious Diseases, calls attention to an apparent increased risk for death from influenza among a subpopulation, pregnant women. Mortimer alerts us to the fact that most (all?) national contingency…
October 26, 2006
A paper delivered at the annual meeting of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine is being reported to say that there is an apparent dose response relationship between cell phone and sperm counts, i.e., the more hours spent on the phone each day the lower sperm count levels.
Scientists in…
October 26, 2006
When it comes to vaccinations, a high degree of safety is one of the paramount issues. This is because even a small risk, like one in a million, when multiplied by tens of millions will produce tens or more of adverse events. The trade-off, of course, is the prevention of the disease the vaccine is…
October 25, 2006
As the October 31 date for the resumption of the trial of the Tripoli 6 looms, the world scientific community is weighing in. From the ScienceNow section of the journal Science:
U.S. scientists are adding their voices to mounting international pressure on Libya to release six foreign medical…
October 25, 2006
[NB: This is a companion to today's post on the Tripoli 6]
Yesterday (October 24) was United Nations Day. Thanks to BoingBoing we were alerted that Librivox, an organization devoted to making available US Public Domain recordings, has an audiobook of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 21…
October 24, 2006
We're getting down to it. What's the scientific basis for a lot of advice that's being given out as if its uncontroversial. Like washing hands. Or shaking hands is the way flu viruses are passed around. From Helen Branswell's usual superior reporting:
Might we all be a little healthier this cold-…
October 24, 2006
An urgent communication from the World Health Organization (WHO) expresses concisely how far behind we are in being prepared for a global pandemic of influenza. Currently there are a number of vaccines under development, some of which might protect against an H5N1 virus that has become readily…
October 23, 2006
Helen Branswell has a story about a battle being waged among virologists and occupational health specialists regarding how influenza is spread from person to person:
Later this week virologists, infection control specialists and occupational health experts from Canada, the U.S. and Britain will…
October 23, 2006
It's an influenza vaccination program's worst nightmare. In Israel, four elderly and chronically ill patients have died of cardiac arrest within days of receiving influenza vaccinations:
Israel suspended flu vaccinations nationwide on Sunday after four men who had been inoculated died in the past…
October 22, 2006
Back in September Janet at Adventures in Ethics and Science challenged Sciencebloggers to a nerd-off. I didn't take part because I have an inherent sense of fairness. Professionals shouldn't compete with amateurs. So I let it go. But now I want to claim my rightful crown from the usurper.
In that…
October 22, 2006
I have a lot of hope for the new generation. My students are wonderful, smart, committed, politically savvy. Much better than the two generations that preceded them, the dead period between the sixties and now (don't take offense; I know a lot of you are, and were, smart, committed and politically…
October 21, 2006
It seems like you can't turn around these days without seeing another vaccine story on the wires. Novartis has announced its cell culture vaccine technology has successfully passed its clinical trials and is preparing for regulatory approvals. Instead ofusing eggs to grow the vaccine seed strain,…
October 20, 2006
We've said it here often, but it's nice to see it in the commercial print media.
Less than a year ago, Americans could barely turn on the television, surf the Internet or pick up a newspaper without finding a doomsday story about deadly avian flu.
By last November, President Bush had asked Congress…
October 19, 2006
You may have heard of sequestered juries in the courtroom but probably you haven't heard of sequestered science. Sequestered science is the name given by the project on Scientific Knowledge and Public Policy (SKAPP) to scientific knowledge concealed from the public. [Full disclosure; I am…
October 19, 2006
There's a report on the wires that scientists at the Vaccine Research Center (VRC) at U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases have developed a DNA vaccine that protects mice against the reconstructed 1918 virus. The paper just appeared online in the Proceedings of the National…
October 18, 2006
There's a lot of good regional reporting around that most of us don't get to see. Consider the Sun Herald in gulfport, Mississippi. We think of Gulfport as Katrina country these days, but like the rest of the world in 1918 it was pandemic flu territory. Local reporter Kat Bergeron looked back nine…
October 18, 2006
A paper has just been published that is a real wake up call. I am stunned more of us didn't think about this sooner.
We all remember the Tamiflu frenzy that ensued in 2004 when people first realized the bird flu train might be coming down the tracks. There was a great deal of talk about how Tamiflu…
October 17, 2006
Lindsay at Majikthise notes that Dear Leader has signed the torture bill, with these words:
"It is a rare occasion when a president can sign a bill that he knows will save American lives," Bush said. "I have that privilege this morning."
Bush signed the bill in the White House East Room, at a table…