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Declan Butler, senior correspondent at Nature, has a particularly infuriating news article today, infuriating because of the attitude it reveals from WHO, CDC and the Indonesian government about releasing information about influenza they alone are privy to. The main points of the article revealing…
We've been carrying on about sanctimonious disloyal Democrat Joe Lieberman for quite a while here. Now Connecticut voters have caught on, too, and Holy Joe is in a world of hurt in the Democratic primary race as he battles political neophyte Ned Lamont. According to print and broadcast media…
If you are worried you'd have to go all the way to China to eat chicken from a bird flu endemic area, worry not. You can just go to Detroit.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture worked with the Michigan Department of Agriculture on a raid at a Troy warehouse. Investigators found chicken, goose and…
In my salad days I had the privilege of team teaching with a brilliant neuroscientist at one of the world's most famous research institutions. In the fifties he had published, with a famous co-author, a foundational paper about peripheral information processing in vision. He was also a brilliant…
So here I am, stuck at the airport with no internet connection. Don't ask me why. I am showing a signal, but this has been the Trip from Hell, so I'm not surprised. It should have been easy. One hour flight time, nice hotel on the waterfront, all day meeting with interesting people discussing…
The national bird flu plan is quite explicit in its promises to local public health. There aren't any. The plan is, "you're on your own." Fair enough. A pandemic happens everywhere so there's no "outside" to send help from. But how well prepared is local public health? Bush has given them the power…
In the first six months of 2006 the number of countries detecting infected birds has doubled. Case fatality remains extraordinarily high. And limited human to human transmission, with at least one moderately large cluster is becoming more evident. WHO continues to say most human infections come…
So what does my Scienceblogs colleague, Dr. Tara Smith of Aetiology know anyways? So she's got an advanced degree and is a practicing epidemiologist. How could she be so smart if she writes stuff like this?
Those of you who have followed creationism/intelligent design literature over the years have…
The leaders of the G8 meet this weekend in St. Petersburg (aka Leningrad aka Petrograd) and they were supposed to announce a business-friendly scheme to get drug companies to make vaccines for the developing world. Looks like it isn't going to happen, though, because the US and France are arguing…
The White House heaved a sigh of relief a few weeks ago upon being told it wouldn't undergo a lobotomy by having Bush's Brain indicted, although we still don't know if Karl Rove struck a deal with the prosecutor to send his former pal, Scooter, Down the River.
Not as big a story, however, is that…
Less than a week ago we posted on an impending public health emergency in the embattled Gaza strip region of Palestine, where a relentless Israeli assault had cut off much of the population from water and power at the height of summer heat. The warning came from our friend, Palestinian doctor and…
The world's pre-eminent scientific journal, Nature, has once again taken notice of blogs. I say "once again" because Nature has consistently been out in front in recognizing that blogging has come to science, not just science to blogging. Senior correspondent Declan Butler has his own blog and was…
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From Modern Mechanix, 1937.
Todays' theme is education. Be sure to enter the Science Education Caption Contest in today's other post. This one is not about science education. It's about peddling soft-core pornography to pre-teens in a popular children's magazine, Cobblestones.
What began as an attempt to educate middle-school…
And I thought my prescription drugs were expensive. The US government has just announced it was exercising its option to buy 20,000 treatment courses of ABthrax (raxibacumab) from Human Genome Sciences. That's $8250 a pop. It will go into the Strategic National Stockpile.
This drug is for…
Several countries have elected to vaccinate poultry as a bird flu control measure. Vietnam and China both have such programs. The Vietnamese program is credited with their good record on bird flu this year. But poultry vaccination has some down sides:
The potential impact on human health of poorly…
The irony is too delicious. Boingboing reports that Yahoo China will be sued by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industries for enabling the pirating of music by disclosing to its users where to get it on the internet. In effect they are being held responsible for the copyright…
Congress is helpless to immunize the American people against bird flu, but they were able to do the next best thing: immunize the vaccine makers against lawsuits. Now the respirator makers want to be next in line for the magic lawsuit vaccine.
Six companies that make respiratory masks want Congress…
A new fatality from H5N1 infection in Indonesia has been confirmed by the WHO reference lab in Hong Kong. So what's new? Nothing in particular except it gives me an opportunity to point out something that has been bothering me about how health officials are characterizing the risk of getting…
The prinicipal author of the American Declaration of Independence, whose 230th anniversary the US celebrates today, wrote this:
The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God.…
The suspicion that China is not as open about disease outbreaks within its borders was not helped last week when a Research Correspondence in The New England Journal of Medicine from eight Chinese scientists reporting an early case of H5N1 infection was the subject of mysterious emails to the…
The FDA might need a shoulder replacement for patting itself on the back. They celebrated "A Century of Protecting and Promoting Public Health" with a ceremony at the Harvey W. Wiley federal building. Or I assume they did. I wasn't there, but they had a press release by way of a personal invitation…
Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is a major cause of blindness and the wet form is the worst version. So it should be good news that the US FDA just announced its approval for a new biological treatment for it. The drug has shown remarkable effectiveness when injected into the eye, monthly.…
A Sermonette is a good place to reprint a confession of faith. This one is bit old (over 51 years) but (unfortunately) is still pertinent. It was uttered by Corliss Lamont, son of a Chairman of the Board of the infamous J. P. Morgan investment bank , who became a committed social activist during…
Suppose a natural catastrophe like a hurricane or a pandemic were to destroy the water supply and power to 1.4 million people living in a densely populated urban environment at the height of summer heat. Suppose the sewer system were severely damaged. That fuel was fast running out so even…
Influenza is a seasonal disease. Some seasons are worse than others. In some locations they can be even more deadly than 1918 pandemic influenza (see post here). What characteristic, then, distinguishes a pandemic outbreak from "regular" seasonal influenza if it is not severity?
Severity is, on…
The momentum is building to release the sequestered flu sequence data. The prestigious scientific journal Nature today published a strongly worded editorial, excerpts of which you can read Nature senior correspondent Declan Butler's blog:
Indonesia has become the hot spot of avian flu, with the…
The question has been broached here before by our commenters: if a pandemic is a threat to our civil infrastructure, how do we know the internet will continue to function? It's fine to tell workers to telecommute, but what if the information highway the commuters travel is grid locked?
Good…
In a post yesterday we talked about West Nile Virus. It causes a mosquito borne disease and most people will have mild or even asymptomatic infections. But you don't want to the be the exception for this one. So what to do?
Here's the typical response in many urban environments:
Yuba-Sutter's…
One of the knocks on the alarms about bird flu is that it is just another in a series of false alarms like Y2K, West Nile and SARS. Not true. Pandemic influenza is indeed another in a series of alarms, but the only one that might conceivably be considered a false alarm (and this isn't even sure) is…