revere
Posts by this author
September 17, 2006
The Pope is embroiled in a nasty mess over remarks he made in Regensburg, Germany, containing a quote from fifteenth century Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Paleologus, made to a Persian (Muslim) emissary. It concerned violence as a way to spread one's faith:
"Show me just what Muhammad brought that…
September 16, 2006
The very first post, ever, on Effect Measure, "The Surgeon General as appetite suppressant" was posted in the morning of Thursday, November 25, 2004. I did it on a lark. Mrs. R. was preparing Thanksgiving dinner and my presence in the kitchen was declared unwanted if not a health hazard. What else…
September 15, 2006
The spin, at least in the headlines, has been that a new study shows treatments for SARS didn't work. Some of the headlines are technically more accurate (e.g., SARS: No evidence that any of the treatments worked), but the impression from media reports remains that researchers found SARS treatments…
September 14, 2006
Whenever I hear about the latest H5N1 vaccine fix I have the same reaction. If only we'd started doing this several years ago when the threat of an avian influenza pandemic was plausible, we'd be so much farther ahead, if not "there" by now. But we didn't. CDC chased the bioterrorism phantom, to…
September 13, 2006
Two members of the UN Security Council, China and France, broke with tradition last week and nominated candidates for the position of WHO Director General. In the past Security Council members have not had citizens in that post. China's candidate is Dr. Margaret Chan. She has a controversial…
September 13, 2006
September 13, 1956 was an important date in computer history. That's when IBM shipped its first hard drive. As Steven Levy tells us in Newsweek, it was the size of two refrigerators and weighed a ton. Lot figurately. Literally. Leasing cost $250,000 a year (2006 dollars). But it was considered a…
September 12, 2006
Over the weekend Menno de Jong and his many collaborators published a detailed clinical study of 18 H5N1 patients diagnosed and treated in Vietnam in 2004 - 2005 (Nature Medicine, subscription only). Thirteen of the cases died and five survived. Like many papers that have received media attention,…
September 11, 2006
Some stories just won't go away. Problems with transparency in China, an impotent government facing a bird flu crisis in Indonesia -- and morale, expertise and credibility going down the toilet at the US Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (aka CDC). Yesterday a very long article in the…
September 11, 2006
Most of us think of Percy Bysshe Shelley as a romantic poet concerned with love and beauty. He was, of course. But he was also a fierce fighter for liberty and foe of unbridled political power.
His target in this sonnet was King George:
England In 1819
An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king…
September 10, 2006
There are many ways to kill innocent people. Suicide bombings against Israeli and Iraqi citizens we hear about. The starvation and strangulation of a whole population is one we don't. From The Independent:
Gaza is dying. The Israeli siege of the Palestinian enclave is so tight that its people are…
September 10, 2006
The soul might not be immortal but the canard there are no atheists in foxholes seems unkillable. This particular piece of mythology goes back to a statement by U.S. Army Chaplain William Thomas Cummings just before the Battle of Bataan in 1942. If the Bataan Death March convinced anyone on it to…
September 9, 2006
It's just early September and already the number of confirmed cases of bird flu in humans has equalled that of all last year. And we are just entering flu season. Since the resurgence of the disease in late 2003 (four cases that year), there has been a steady escalation, with 46 cases in 2004,…
September 9, 2006
Science textbooks are expensive so one would think everyone would be happy about the free books being handed out to all students by the South Iron Elementary School in Annapolis, Missouri. Wouldn't you know it, some activist Federal judge stopped it:
A federal judge ordered a small-town school to…
September 8, 2006
In late July the American Psychological Association went in the same direction, but only a fraction of the distance, as the American Psychiatric Association and the American Medical Association by adopting a resolution prohibiting its members from engaging in or offering training in torture and…
September 7, 2006
As promised, we have the full slate (13) of those running for Director General of the World Health Organization:
Dr. Kazem Behbehani (Kuwait); Dr. Margaret Chan (China); Dr. Julio Frenk (Mexico); David Gunnarsson (Iceland); Dr. Nay Htun (Myanmar); Dr. Karam Karam (Syria); Dr. Bernard Kouchner (…
September 7, 2006
Oh, yes, yes, yes. Oh sweet poetic justice. Oh joy, oh joy.
Last November, Shawn Hogan received an unsettling call: A lawyer representing Universal Pictures and the Motion Picture Association of America informed the 30-year-old software developer that they were suing him for downloading Meet the…
September 6, 2006
With all the talk of transparency, we learn that China has yet to share its avian flu isolates with the world scientific community. This is different than the sequence issue. China has shared its sequences, but the sequences don't tell the whole story. In particular, we are still not able to make…
September 6, 2006
On Labor Day, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) issued a press release whose title summarizes its contents all too neatly: Bush Declares Eco-Whistleblower Law Void for EPA Employees. Here's some of it:
Washington, DC - The Bush administration has declared itself immune from…
September 5, 2006
CDC's Open Access journal, Emerging Infectious Diseases, has just published an interesting communication from an international team of scientists who surveyed Cambodian villagers in Kampot province immediately after a 28-year old male died of H5N1 infection in March 2005. The team also conducted…
September 5, 2006
With the news of the tragic death of "Crocodile Hunter" Steve Irwin, stabbed through the heart by a stingray while filming a nature program, I was reminded of similar story. Well, maybe not so similar, because the victim was not a committed conservationist like Irwin, but a deep sea fisherman.…
September 4, 2006
Look, obesity is a problem. No denying it. But.
When the chairperson of an international conference (diabetologist Paul Zimmet from Monash University in Australia) tells a meeting of 2500 experts and health officials there is an "insidious, creeping pandemic of obesity [that] is now engulfing the…
September 4, 2006
I brought this up once before and it got a negative reaction that surprised me. So I am prepared for more of the same. I am undeterred. So here it is: Cultured meat. I rather like the idea: growing meat in tissue culture.
From a (largely negative) article on Alternet:
Take some stem cells, or…
September 4, 2006
A weird study of men's preference for filled out or thin women is said to show that hungry men prefer heavier women than satiated men.
[Researchers] recruited male university students as they entered or exited a campus dining hall during dinner time.
They asked the men to rate how hungry they were…
September 3, 2006
When someone found a dead rooster on his Manhattan apartment fire escape, the worried resident sensibly thought something was amiss and called police. If this were Thailand or Indonesia we might be thinking bird flu. But there was a vital clue pointing to a non-viral etiology: the rooster was…
September 3, 2006
Sunday of Labor Day weekend. The Reveres are wending their way (separately) back to their home bases after a month on vacation (Mrs. R.:"Vacation? So how come you were blogging every day!"). Soon we'll be in the heaven of broadband after a month of dial-up. This heaven is here on earth, however,…
September 2, 2006
As a blogger, I'm apparently in the minority in more ways than one (I speak here as one of the Reveres and for myself only). A telephone survey done by the Pew Internet and American Life project estimates that half of bloggers are below the age of 30 (not me, alas), are interested in blogging as a…
September 1, 2006
WHO has just issued case definitions for H5N1 infections. Case definitions are criteria that must be satisfied to designate a person as being "a case" of H5N1 infection. Case definitions are not clinical tools but epidemiological ones. Epidemiological measures pertain to populations and require the…
September 1, 2006
The Thai newspaper, The Nation, is reporting that Thai researchers will soon report in the CDC journal Emerging Infectious Diseases a case of a dog infected with H5N1 after it was fed infected poultry. The current Indonesian cluster in the hamlet of Ranca Salak in the subdistrict of Cikelet, Garut…
August 31, 2006
No young man likes to be embarrassed in front of his mother, especially in the delicate matter of sex.
But this story is beyond belief:
Madin Azad Amin was stopped by officials on Aug. 16 after guards found an object in his baggage that resembled a grenade, prosecutors said.
When officers asked him…
August 31, 2006
An article in the current issue of Annals of Internal Medicine again raises the issue of passive immunization to treat H5N1 using plasma from recovered cases (Eurealert). The idea is that antibodies against H5N1 in the convalescent blood of a recovered case would be therapeutically effective. This…