revere
Posts by this author
November 29, 2009
We talk so much about the flu virus we thought we'd show you some nice pics that CDC has just put up. This is a review for many of you put reviews are always helpful. In these three pics, only one is the actual swine flu virus, the other two being "cartoon" depictions of a generic influenza virus.…
November 29, 2009
When the singer-songwriter Phil Ochs took his own life in 1976 he was a year and a half older than me. It's hard for some of us to believe he's been gone 33 years. His music and the ideals he fought for are still so strong. Phil was best known for his anti-war songs. Yet he wrote a different kind…
November 28, 2009
I sometimes wake up in the middle of the night and think about things. In fact I frequently have a problem with early waking. I think it's age related. In any event, one of the things I sometimes think about (mainly I think about my research or something connected with it, which is one reason why I…
November 27, 2009
It seems swine flu is full of surprises that turn out not to be surprises. Or so it's claimed. Or not. Here is CDC's Dr. Anne Schuchat, the agency's chief health officer and spokesperson on swine flu, responding to NPR's Melissa Block's question about what has been her biggest surprise:
Dr.…
November 26, 2009
Today is Thanksgiving in the United States, and the inevitable political innuendoes aside, it's usually a holiday I like. I'm fond of my family -- both my own and my wife's -- and glad to see them, although in recent years we have dwindled down to a few. Still, I basically have good memories of…
November 25, 2009
We just realized that today is our fifth blogiversary. Young if you are a human, prime of life if you are a dog, but Methuselah if you are a blog. We've not gone dark for a single day in those five years, although on many we've thought about turning off the lights permanently. But we're still here…
November 25, 2009
In the US we are about to embark on the Thanksgiving holiday, a 4 day period where families get together for a celebratory meal (at least celebratory unless you are one of the original inhabitants of the continent). There is lots of intergenerational visiting (grandparents to great grandchildren…
November 24, 2009
All geeks love science jokes (one of my favorites: what's purple and drives to work? Answer: an Abelian grape [explanation, the elements of an Abelian group commute, i.e., a + b = b + a]).
Science jokes are good. You can learn some science from them. In particular, the first three or four of this…
November 23, 2009
The US has ordered 250 million doses of swine flu vaccine, mainly from foreign manufacturers. That's a large proportion of the world's productive capacity. A couple of the biggest vaccine makers, Glaxo-SmithKline (GSK) and Sanofi Pasteur, have promised to make donations to WHO for use in the poorer…
November 22, 2009
Since the way Chinese public health officials traditionally save face is by covering their ass, when I hear things like this I don't automatically believe it:
"With initial efforts of containment, actually we not only reduced the impact of the first wave to China, but we also won time for us to…
November 22, 2009
Biblical exegesis as it was meant to be:
November 21, 2009
The Norwegian Institute of Public Health is reporting sporadic occurrences of a mutation in a portion of the flu virus that is involved with the process by which it attaches to cells. I use the word "sporadic" because at this point there is no evidence that the cases where the genetic change has…
November 20, 2009
Swine flu is a special danger to the young, but the biggest danger to the young is not an infectious disease but unintentional accidents. No matter what your age accident is among the top ten causes of death, but for those between the ages of 1 and 44 it is number one. Prevention oriented accident…
November 19, 2009
The Director of Loyola University Medical Center's clinical microbiology laboratory is reported as saying that rapid flu tests are a public health risk. Here's some of what he said and then my explanation as to why it is misleading or just plain wrong:
Rapid influenza diagnostic tests used in…
November 18, 2009
I have been away (again) and out of internet contact most of the day, dealing with an unhappy family event. So this post is short but illustrates an important point that comes up frequently in epidemiology: the difference between risks and absolute numbers. The illustration is not medical, but I…
November 17, 2009
The blogosphere (DemFromCT at DailyKos) and the main stream media (Alan Sipress at the Washington Post) brought us the two faces of the current flu pandemic. Like Janus, one took lessons from the present and past, the other looked worriedly to the future.
Dem's piece on flu at DailyKos (a regular…
November 16, 2009
We were asked repeatedly offline and in the comments for our views on what was or was not going on in the Ukraine, but we steadfastly declined to post on it. We didn't know any more than you can find out from news sources, so we had nothing to add in the way of hard information, We did know there…
November 15, 2009
Any article entitled "On swine-flu conspiracy theories" should have an automatic warning label, but the one noted below, in the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail is really terrific (h/t ML). Conspiracy theories are all over the internet and they even show up here in the comments from time to…
November 15, 2009
You all know this song, but it is unusually affecting when sung by a child:
November 14, 2009
We've talked aplenty about how much we still need to understand about influenza. Not just its basic biology but its dynamics. How does it spread over space and time and how existing infection rates affect future infection rates and how each are related to the number of susceptibles in the…
November 13, 2009
We're writing this at an altitude of 20,000 feet, being on the road again and except for a few minutes here or there, without access to the internet most of the day. This means a lot of comments will probably go unanswered, so we'll say what we usually do in circumstances like this: talk amongst…
November 12, 2009
I don't know if the rest of the world laughs at the US, but I feel quite sure they at least shake their collective heads when they hear how we lack one of the most important non-pharmaceutical measures against pandemic flu: paid sick leave. Of course only those countries with a policy of paid sick…
November 11, 2009
This is an exact repeat of a post one year ago today. Except for this preamble about how disgusted we are that we have to repeat it:
The Reveres, November 11, 2009, year six of the War in Iraq and year eight of the War in Afghanistan
November 10, 2009
Nursing homes (Long Term Care Facilities, LTCFs) are a favorite hunting ground for respiratory viruses, including flu. They are open to the general community, where visitors and employees mingle freely with the residents. The residents are usually of an advanced age, have other sicknesses that make…
November 9, 2009
We only just got to the surgical/N95 mask article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). We've been traveling and haven't been able to keep up with what others were saying, but we're sure it's been well covered by the usual suspects. So we'll just add our take here, for what it'…
November 8, 2009
It looks like there's going to be some kind of health care reform bill, but we're not celebrating. It's legislation that could have been important and meaningful and instead is a neutered industry-friendly cup of weak tea with a Draconian anti-choice amendment. That Obama would disappoint us is no…
November 8, 2009
Richard Dawkins has taken a lot of abuse himself for having the temerity to suggest that some kinds of religious upbringings can be considered abusive even if no physical harm is involved. We know that Catholic children suffered abuse at the hands of priests and nuns, and that some fundamentalist…
November 7, 2009
I first read Barbara Ehrenreich in 1971 when she wrote The American Health Empire: Power, Profits, and Politics with her (then) husband John Ehrenreich (Health PAC, 1971). She was by then a PhD in cell biology (Rockefeller University) and anti-war activist. We traveled in the same circles and I…
November 6, 2009
Helen Branswell, the Canadian Press's extraordinary flu reporter, is one of the few reporters who could have written the article, "Flu dogma being rewritten by a strange virus no one pegged to trigger a pandemic". She's been following flu for years and has watched as one thing after another we…
November 5, 2009
For somebody so out to lunch on so many issues there is something undeniably likable about Ron Paul. As congressthings, he and Dennis Kucinich (there's an odd couple) had the clearest and best positions on the Iraq debacle. And as a principled libertarian (there seem to be some big chinks in Paul's…