Tara C. Smith
Associate Professor, lab rat (microbiologist/infectious disease epidemiologist) and occasional blogger, full-time nerd.
tsmith
Posts by this author
January 13, 2006
I know some of you out there do this. You've spent so many hours asking your creationist friends to define a "kind," or explaining why the "tornado in a junkyard" or "watchmaker" analogies are hopelessly flawed, that you're beginning to see flagella and mousetraps in your sleep. I mean, look at…
January 12, 2006
I should request other people write my posts more often! Back in November, I wrote a post about a novel type of antibiotics made from naturally occuring antimicrobial peptides that are produced by a wide variety of organisms, including humans. In that post, I referenced something called "phage…
January 12, 2006
I'm still working on finishing up 3 manuscripts (one book, 2 journal articles) so I've not blogged quite as much this week as I generally do. Next week I should be back up to speed, and have a few topics in the queue that I want to get to. Luckily for you, though, John Hawks has a pair of…
January 12, 2006
I mentioned this CBC "docudrama" yesterday. Just wanted to give a quick update, since they added a lot of info to their site since I checked it out yesterday morning (including a fictional blog!). So, some resources that might be interesting even to those of you who didn't catch it on TV:…
January 11, 2006
As of today, Seed's new science blogs are open for business. (Be sure to check out the list of other bloggers there--it packs quite a punch). To my regular readers, thanks for following me over here, and expect to see pretty much the same things I've written about in the past. Y'know, constant…
January 10, 2006
For those of you in Canada, check this out tonight at 9.BLACK DAWN: THE NEXT PANDEMIC
A fifth estate "What if..."
Wednesday, January 11th at 9:00 p.m. on CBC-TV
What would happen if the World Health Organization declared what has long been expected and feared: human-to-human transmission of the…
January 10, 2006
This comes as no surprise to many health care providers and public health officials: most states are unprepared for health crises.Few states are equipped to handle emergency medical crises such as a terrorist attack, a natural disaster or an influenza outbreak, according to an analysis being…
January 10, 2006
Okay, one more quick post. I've talked quite a bit on here (and over on Panda's Thumb) about the importance of surveillance, and how the current death rates from H5N1 influenza ("bird flu") are likely to be artificially high, since we're more likely to diagnose the very ill cases than the mild or…
January 10, 2006
I've been meaning to write something up about this for awhile, but keep forgetting. Anyhoo, because my own dog is currently ill and it's stressing me out watching her (not due to this, thankfully), I thought I'd do my own little part to get the word out to any dog owners who may not have heard of…
January 5, 2006
Microbial ecology, and its relation to the development of infectious disease, is an ever-growing field of study. Of course, there are a vast number of bacterial species living amongst us, most of which do not cause us any harm. Others may infect us only when, so to speak, the stars align in a…
December 24, 2005
NHANES is an abbreviation that's quite familiar to epidemiologists of all stripes: the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. This survey dates back to 1956 with the passage of the National Health Survey Act, providing legislative authorization for "a continuing survey to provide…
December 20, 2005
kay, after going through the whole Kitzmiller decision last night, and damn, it's good. Really, incredibly good. This should be required reading. Jones' disgust at the whole thing comes through loud and clear. On page 29:
Although proponents of the IDM (Intelligent Design movement) occasionally…
December 20, 2005
Plaintiffs Prevail
The much-awaited decision in the Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District is now available.
The 139 page document finds for the plaintiffs.
Judge Jones finds that "intelligent design" is not science. The DASD ID policy violates both purpose and effect prongs of the Lemon…
December 16, 2005
I love these historical analyses of disease--real, or fictional. One historical event that has been the subject of much speculation over the decades has been the Plague of Athens, a mysterious outbreak that is thought to have changed the direction of the Peloponnesian War, and for which the cause…
December 13, 2005
...I was suffering the worst pain I'd ever experienced. I arrived at the hospital a bit before 1AM, and spent the next four hours or so walking around in agony. By 5AM, I decided I was ready for some of the good drugs, but the nurse informed me it was too late--time for the real fun to start. My…
December 5, 2005
Clostridium difficile has joined MRSA, SARS, avian influenza, and West Nile as a hot new emerging disease. This bacterium, a cousin to Clostridium tetani-the causative agent of tetanus--and Clostridium botulinum--the botulism bacterium--is a spore-forming anaerobe. Carried by about 3 percent of…
December 1, 2005
As I've mentioned before, Ebola is a virus near and dear to my heart. (Figuratively, not literally. I'm not quite that enamored of it). In that previous post, I mentioned that we didn't know the reservoir of Ebola in nature. It certainly isn't for lack of trying that it wasn't determined…
November 29, 2005
Link to CNN story.Stan Berenstain, who with his wife created the popular children's books about the Berenstain Bears, has died.
In more than 200 books, the Berenstain Bears, written and illustrated by Stan and Jan Berenstain, helped children for 40 years cope with trips to the dentist, eating junk…
November 22, 2005
I've mentioned many times on here reservations I have over the current avian flu numbers--how many subclinical or mild infections are being missed? Are they indeed offset by the number of serious disease cases we're also missing? There's a reason for these questions, and it's now out in electronic…
November 20, 2005
...and has spawned some press coverage, here in the Ames Tribune and here in the Cedar Rapids Gazette, making us the first state to have faculty from all Regent universities speak out against intelligent design. I'll briefly address some of the comments.
In the first article, U of I physics…
November 17, 2005
Just a few weeks back, I discussed new research showing that prions had been found in urine. Now, a new paper in Nature(Nature summary) shows that the prion protein has been found in the mammary glands of sheep affected with scrapie:
The inflamed mammary glands of sheep have been found to contain…
November 15, 2005
Resistance to antibiotics has been a concern of scientists almost since their widespread use began. In a 1945 interview with the New York Times, Alexander Fleming himself warned that the misuse of penicillin could lead to selection of resistant forms of bacteria, and indeed, he’d already derived…
November 9, 2005
Wonder what the anti-vaccination crowd makes of this?
Measles cases and deaths fall by 60% in Africa since 1999
Largely due to the technical and financial support of the Measles Initiative and commitment from African governments, more than 200 million children in Africa have been vaccinated against…
October 31, 2005
As mentioned in the comments to this post, there is a brewing controversy over upcoming guidelines outlining who should receive the "cervical cancer vaccine," a vaccine against the human papilloma virus (HPV). Briefly, the HPV vaccine is a highly effective (100% in a 2-year clinical trial) vaccine…
October 27, 2005
(And not in a supportive way). PZ and Orac discussed a recent New England Journal of Medicine editorial critical of intelligent design. Though the article had several shortcomings, it's always a bonus to see other scientists treating ID as a valid threat (not in the scientific sphere, of course,…
October 24, 2005
Doctors recommend hepatitis shot for kids
Hepatitis A is a virus that causes (obviously) hepatitis, as well as jaundice, fatigue, nausea, fever, loss of appetite, and diarrhea. It's often spread fecal-orally; that is, you put something in your mouth that has fecal contamination. (Just makes you…
October 20, 2005
That's my new favorite anti-ID quote, spoken by Mark Blumberg, at the University of Iowa Freethinkers' panel discussion on intelligent design last evening. Dr. Blumberg was discussing what a piss-poor design the human vertebral column is, and concluded his talk with the comment above. The other…
October 20, 2005
I liked him so much better during his "Tiger Beat" days. Next thing they'll tell me is that Boner has become a monk...
(But on the plus side, "argument from banana" is now my favorite creationist argument).
October 19, 2005
It's situations like this that really irk me.
I mentioned the tularemia detection in DC here almost 2 weeks ago, already annoyed that there hadn't been more information about it. There has been some discussion on the ProMed list, but it's hardly been a blip in the mainstream media. Yesterday, there…
October 18, 2005
Ah, how rare is it that my interest in stomping creationists and my interest in infectious disease collide. But I guess that when there's a topic as hot as avian influenza, it's inevitable that even the folks at the DI will sit up and take notice, as Casey Luskin has in this post: Avian Flu: An…