revere
Posts by this author
July 28, 2006
It seems the dam has broken in Thailand as far as talking about possible bird flu. For nine months the Thais have been saying their aggressive culling strategy has been working to keep H5N1 at bay. We and others have wondered if the virus was just flying beneath the Thai radar, despite official…
July 27, 2006
Influenza/A viruses naturally infect aquatic wildfowl like ducks and there are a lot of influenza/A subtypes besides the H5N1 that has been in the news. Some people are heavily exposed to wild ducks, namely serious duck hunters and game handlers. Why don't they get infected with some of the other…
July 27, 2006
The human bird flu vaccine news from pharma giant GlaxoSmithKline sounds good and it probably is. Probably. There is a lot we don't know yet as the results have not been published in the open medical literature. Here's what GSK is claiming.
First, they claim to have produced a vaccine that raises…
July 26, 2006
You've probably never heard of bronchiolitis obliterans and you certainly don't want to have it. The name tells the story. The bronchioles are the smaller airway tubes that transport oxygen and carbon dioxide to and from the portions of your lungs where the gases are exchanged in the blood. If you…
July 26, 2006
It's nice we have straightened out Afghanistan. No more nasty Taliban.
The Department for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, which is the formal name for the religious police who enforced strict, conservative Islamic law during the 1990's, is being reinstated by President Karzai's…
July 25, 2006
Avian influenza is capable of infecting mammals other than humans. Like domestic cats. Cats are companion animals ("pets") in Europe and North America and live as closely with humans as birds do in Indonesia, southeast asia and China, perhaps even more closely. They are thus potential bridge…
July 25, 2006
The return of H5N1 to Thailand we were pretty sure was underway has now been confirmed. Our real question is whether it is new or just poking its head above water after having been there all along without being "detected." We put that in scare quotes because we suspect the surveillance system in…
July 24, 2006
If you want a summary of all that is wrong with Indonesian bird flu policy, here it is:
The huge territory and people's ignorance had hampered Indonesian health authorities' efforts to eliminate bird flu, Indonesian Vice President Jusuf Kalla said on Friday.
Since the government launched massive…
July 24, 2006
That pharmaceutical giant Hoffman-La Roche would have trouble meeting the orders it received for its antiviral Tamiflu was well known and not a surprise. Roche's manufacturing method is said to be laborious, dangerous in spots and have a long production cycle (NB: shorter and cheaper methods have…
July 23, 2006
China is reporting more bird flu in chickens, this time in the northwest province of Xinjiang (India News). It is Thailand, however, that is attracting attention because of the alleged lull in reported cases from there along with praise the country has received for its seeming success in curbing…
July 23, 2006
Last week's Sermonette was about the joy of the apocalyptics that the Middle East conflagration signaled the End Times. This week we turn to Robert Frost's version, and address it with all due respect to our fellow human beings in Israel and Palestine:
Fire and Ice
Some say the world will end in…
July 22, 2006
Time to update everyone on the status of banned blogs in India. Allegedly the bans are coming off, and the worldwide outrage is part of the reason, IMO. As interesting, is the backstory as it is now coming out in the Indian press.
The whole episode started when a hard right American website,…
July 22, 2006
Indonesia has come under strong criticism because its agriculture department has been unable to cope with the avian influenza epidemic in its backyard and commercial poultry. Among other things, Indonesia doesn't have an effective mandatory surveillance program for the infection in birds. Guess who…
July 21, 2006
The world's leading science journal, Nature, has been hitting editorial home runs lately. This week it's a real prize, "Safety catch." The subject is the Bush administration's proposals for how the government should go about conducting risk assessments.
Risk assessments are a sensitive topic with…
July 21, 2006
The US Food and Drug Administration is celebrating its centenary, but a good proportion of its scientists are not so thrilled with what it has become. The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) just released a survey of 997 FDA scientists, co-sponsored by Public Employees for Environmental…
July 20, 2006
It sounds trivial but it isn't. What to do about pets in the event of a disaster. We saw in the Katrina evacuation how failure to take separation anxiety of pet owners into account created a major public safety problem. People were unwilling to leave their dogs, cats and other pets behind and if…
July 20, 2006
CDC has disgorged $225 million to state and local health departments for bird fluhttp://www.dhhs.gov/news/press/2006pres/20060711.html. That's some good news, made better by the fact that these phase II allocations seem usable for a wider range of public health needs than bioterrorism or bird flu,…
July 19, 2006
We've beaten up enough on poor China for its transparent attempts to control information within its borders. Time to beat up on poor India.
From Boingboing:
India's Department of Telecommunications (DoT) passed an order to ISPs Friday to block several websites. The list is confidential. Indian…
July 19, 2006
It's not news the nation is having a heat wave although it is making the news, as temperatures in the nineties and above were reported in city after city, from one coast to the other and in between. Good opportunity to talk physics and physiology.
Your body is a prodigious producer of heat, which…
July 18, 2006
The ultra right US House of Representatives has voted to lift some restrictions on embryonic stem cell research and the Senate will likely follow suit, maybe as soon as today (New Scientist). The bill effectively zeroes out a five year ban on federal financing of stem cell research by allowing…
July 18, 2006
If you are a US citizen unfortunate enough to get caught in a war zone, don't expect much from the US State Department. Or at least don't expect anything if you can't pay for it:
A message to the American citizens in Lebanon:
The Department of State continues to work with the Department of Defense…
July 17, 2006
Our wiki partner and blogiste extraordinary, Melanie, is back at Just a Bump in the Beltway. Note the new URL and new look.
Her absence over the last week was a result of a Trackback spam attack that took her down. Now that she's on a new MT build we hope she'll not have the problem again.
If you'…
July 17, 2006
An interesting Commentary on the problem of releasing the flu sequences has been posted on the blog Anthropologique by its proprietor, J. F. Brinkworth. I disagree with it, but he makes some pertinent points.
Brinkworth believes WHO is not at fault for failure to release the Indonesian sequences…
July 17, 2006
Indonesia has now done in one year what it took Vietnam three years to "accomplish": rack up 42 deaths from bird flu . Indonesia and Vietnam are now tied for the most number of deaths from the disease, although Indonesia did it with fewer cases, a reflection of the fact the case fatality ratio in…
July 16, 2006
The last thing little Lizzette Peña ever did in this world was to climb up to get a toy atop the family's 37 inch TV. It fell and crushed her skull, killing her.
Freak accident? Maybe, but there are a lot just like it. Lisette lived in Houston, where the staff of Memorial Hermann Hospital there…
July 16, 2006
Maybe you think a bird flu pandemic will be a world destroying event and maybe you don't think so. Most people who read this site, however, fear a pandemic. There are others, though, for whom a really bad pandemic is just the ticket. They are the "End Times" religious groups, and all of the Big…
July 15, 2006
The frozen chicken from China story has a follow-up. You may remember that a warehouse full of the chicken was found in Detroit although import is banned to the US because it came from an area where there is bird flu. An unstated amount of the meat was already in commerce in restaurants and retail…
July 14, 2006
Indonesia has sacked its animal health official in charge of bird flu (BBC). The Government of Indonesia has said his departure was a result of a routine rotation of personnel. Right. And George Bush is really one of the Andrew Sisters.
This is clearly a lie and is stupid on two counts. The first…
July 14, 2006
Whenever we talk here about immunity from lawsuits for Big Pharma I hear a lot about so-called frivolous lawsuits. Those aren't the lawsuits that are clogging our court system since only about 10% of lawsuits are tort actions. But I'll concede one thing: there is such a thing as a frivolous lawsuit…