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Katrina. One year later. Heck of a job, FEMA, Bush, Brownie, Chertoff and all of the Department of Homeland Security gang of fuck-ups and their bosses.
Some people think that Joe Lieberman's idea to put FEMA in DHS was a bad idea. But DHS is the right place for FEMA. Incompetent, screw-up agencies…
I have a lot of tolerance for eccentricity as long as it doesn't hurt anyone. I'm a western physician who believes strongly in modern medical science, but I'm not as rabid and offended by alternative medicine as many of my colleagues. As long as it doesn't hurt anyone. Which unfortunately it…
Here's a particularly worthless article from the AP: Docs say Tamiflu won't affect foetus.
This is clearly an important question. In the event of a pandemic, Tamflu will be used prophylactically in pregnant women, either by choice or because the women don't know they are pregnant. There is…
It's hard for a lot of us to understand how the rich get richer by giving money away, but here's one way.
Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt and his relatives have claimed millions of dollars in tax deductions through a type of charitable foundation they created that until recently…
Genetically modified cotton resistant to bollworm is a reality and five million Chinese cotton farmers have embraced it. It works, too, killing bollworm larvae that used to kill their cotton. IN the late 1990s it looked like a miracle. Pesticide use was cut by 70%. After seven years, though, the…
I have no doubt deciding who should get awards is a difficult business. Too many worthy candidates, only a few awards.
Still.
This week the 2006 Science-in-Society award winners were announced by the National Association of Science Writers (NASW):
NASW holds the independent competition annually…
Here's a great idea for your home. Install a sprinkler system that sprays pesticide mist twice a day, all summer long to control nuisance mosquitoes. The system uses quarter inch tubing a metal spray nozzles buried in the yard like a lawn sprinkler. A small tank and attached pump operate for 30…
Nothing offends like the truth. From The Onion:
War-Torn Middle East Seeks Solace In Religion
August 23, 2006 | Issue 42â¢34
JERUSALEM--As an uneasy truce between Israel and Hezbollah continues, millions of average men and women in the Holy Land are turning to the one simple comfort that has always…
The headline -- U.S. border states preparing for pandemic flu threat -- sounded weird, but this is about some good ideas. The weird part was expecting this was about hardening the borders to keep bird flu out. In fact, however, it is about something much more sensible: the clear understanding that…
An excellent story from Bloomberg News by John Lauerman brings us up to date on an issue we raised yesterday concerning giving breaks on biologicals (like vaccines) to countries who deposit sequence data in publicly accessible databases like Genbank:
Poorer countries where bird flu is spreading may…
A new initiative on sharing avian influenza data has just been announced, called the Global Initiative on Sharing Avian Influenza Data (GISAID). This is the latest in a series of developments that have opened up influenza sequence data to the world scientific community to an unprecedented extent, a…
If you confront other people who think bird flu has gone away as a concern or read news articles to that effect, consider this. In April of this year there were 45 countries reporting infections in their bird or poultry populations. Now, four months later, there are 55. The UN's Food and…
Good news from CDC. Yesterday they announced immediate public release of some 650 influenza gene sequences. The new openness is part of a collaboration with the Association of Public Health Laboratories (APHL):
Through the new collaboration, CDC expects to provide genetic information for several…
Recently we posted about pending legislation that would have gutted hundreds of state and local food safety laws. The argument was that the federal government could do this more consistently and eliminate the confusion of a patchwork of different laws. The patchwork would be eliminated all right.…
With all the talk about non avian reservoirs for H5N1, a little talk about flies might be in order, not because we think they are vectors for H5N1 (so far no evidence of that), but just because we like to talk about them. The subject came up recently in a New Zealand Medical Journal article (…
The "fresh air" smell of a lot of air fresheners is really the smell of pollution according to a paper from scientists at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. That's because 1,4 dichlorobenzene (1,4 DCB), found in air fresheners, toilet bowl cleaners, mothballs and various "…
We had hoped to have better information about the possible cluster of bird flu cases in remote West Java, but the situation remains murky and unresolved. Nothing especially reassuring has yet happened to ease the discomfort of health authorities regarding whatever is happening there, at any rate.…
Sometimes on Sunday I catch up on my backed up journal reading. High profile journals like Nature and Science are great except for one major defect: they come once a week, every week. They tend to pile up. So I browse them, looking for interesting articles or just satisfying my somewhat eclectic…
WHO has taken note (.pdf) of the increasing genetic diversity of the H5N1 influenza/A viral isolates as the disease spreads geographically. Clades are genetically related viruses with common ancestors. Since 2003, two such clades have appeared (clades 1 and 2), distinct from the original H5N1…
Another possible Indonesian cluster in a remote West Java village is being reported by fragmentary news sources.
One report has it that a 35 year old woman has died in Cikelet, a village where a 9 year old girl and and a 17 year old male are confirmed cases. The male's 20 year old cousin died of…
Another bird flu death has occurred in the same village where two other cases were recently reported. This one is a nine year old girl. The others were the 17 year old we discussed in a recent post, who left the hospital against medical advice and is reported to be recovering at home, and his…
In the days -- and weeks -- following the frantic rescue work after the destruction of the World Trade Center, the US EPA reassured everyone there was no harm from breathing the dust and fumes from that catastrophe. We now suspect this was quite wrong and EPA should have known it from the outset.…
A helpful reader (hat tip to easy hiker) sent along a story from New Scientist concerning a new report in The New England Journal of Medicine. The NEJM paper is a case series of six subjects who almost died as a result of a clinical trial of a monoclonal antibody being tested as a drug for…
Whatever is going on in Thailand, everybody seems uncomfortable with it. After being praised by WHO for its bird flu measures because the country had not reported cases since last December, the virus has come roaring back, as if to remind us it isn't going to be so easy. Which most of knew, of…
The most recent human case of bird flu in Indonesia raises some extremely interesting questions. Here are the facts.
A 17 year old farmer, named Umar Aup, in a remote province of West Java became seriously ill with an influenza-like disease after he and his cousin collected the carcasses of about…
I'll give the UK and US governments the benefit of the doubt for the sake of argument (even though they are both world class liars) and assume the alleged hair-gel terror plot is real. The response to it is still monumentally stupid. So what do I know about hair gel? Nothing. I don't use it.
But I…
India has declared itself avian flu-free. Unlikely, but technically correct, at least in the sense of the definition of the Office International des Epizooties (OIE, the World Organization for Animal Health).
India first detected highly pathogenic avian influenza H5N1 in its poultry flocks earlier…
You shouldn't be reading this, because the blogs are fluorishing but poor network TV is languishing. The middle of July saw its least viewed week in the history of broadcast TV in the US (via Boingboing):
CBS, ABC, NBC and Fox averaged 20.8 million viewers during the average prime-time minute last…
From war hero to atheist pariah.
Pat Tillman was a pro football player who gave up his career to enlist in the Army after 9/11. He went to Afghanistan and was killed in combat, his death an icon for the patriotic fervor that served the neocon debacle perfectly. But Pat Tillman turned out to be an…