revere | May 1, 2010Arizona, you are looking ugly. Defenders claim its Draconian measures are a result of the failure of US immigration policy, and I have to agree. Everyone seems to agree on the need for immigration reform, but like the weather, no one wants to do anything about it. The Democrats have a bill, but no one seems to think it will succeed in an election year and may be only window dressing, anyway. The bill puts securing the border first, followed by provisions for fraud-proof identity cards. Bringing up the rear are tough requirements that would allow a path to citizenship for people currently…
revere | April 30, 2010On the surface the story in Wired made perfect sense: Twin Study Deepens Multiple Sclerosis Mystery. It is about a new study from the National Center for Genome Resources that compared the genetic endowments of three sets of identical twins, one each of which contracted multiple sclerosis (MS), the other didn't. This was a full bore effort that wound up costing $1.5 million over a year and a half to sequence 2.8 billion base pairs in each twin, determine if they come from the mother or father and then -- and this is the amazing part -- determine the entire epigenome of the CD4 cell, one of…
revere | April 29, 2010I'm all for scientific -- and statistical -- literacy, but sometimes the calls for it exasperate me. Just a little. Not significantly. If you know what I mean. Or you think you know what I mean. Anyway.
Yesterday Wired carried a piece by Clive Thompson, Why We Should Learn the Language of Data. It's a bit presumptuous to say that statistics is "the" language of data (data speak many languages and there are dialects within each), but I'll let that go. And I'm sympathetic when someone has to keep answering charges that if global warming was happening, why was there so much snow? This question…
revere | April 28, 2010Self medicating for mood disorders is well known. It is often quite harmful, with the chief culprits being ethyl alcohol and nicotine. But there are others. One that comes up often is chocolate as an antidote to feelings of depression. Not everyone who eats chocolate is depressed, of course. Probably most of us who do it do it because we like chocolate. When I was in elementary school I used to eat a lot of Hershey bars after school. They cam in six-packs and one memorable day I found two whole packs and one pack with a single bar missing. I ate all 17 in one sitting. Two hours later I ate…
revere | April 27, 2010Once, long ago, I used to be in a radiology department in a famous hospital. I liked radiology quite a bit and even before becoming a doctor I worked in them. Later I did research on the kinds of errors radiologists make when they read x-rays. One of the errors that was extremely well known even 40 plus years ago (although that didn't prevent it from being made with dismaying consistency up to and including today) was something called "satisfaction of search error." In essence, it meant that once one abnormality was found on an x-ray, there was an increased chance of missing a second,…
revere | April 26, 2010What are we to make of the swine flu pandemic? The only thing I feel confident about is that it will be some time before we really know. A great deal of data and experience was gained in the year since the pandemic H1N1 took everyone by surprise but it will be a while before we can harvest all of it. Meanwhile I can say things were better than we thought they might be and certainly better than everyone's worst fears, but how much better -- better, how bad -- they were we just don't know. It was a very good year for people in my age category (over 65) as for reasons now becoming a bit clearer…
revere | April 25, 2010It's been a couple of months since we posted on the anthrax story, the story that refuses to die despite the fact the FBI has done its best to close the case out. But here we are again, our 11th post on the subject, this time because a colleague of the conveniently deceased alleged anthrax terrorist, Dr. Bruce Ivins, has defended him publicly while testifying before a panel of the National Academies tasked with reviewing the case:
Henry “Hank” Heine, who left the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) in February 2010 after testing antibiotics there for 11…
revere | April 25, 2010Got this in my email. For all I know the whole country got it. That's how these campaigns go these days. I'm not sure its origin [Source, author Rick Chertof in Tikkun; thanks to reader LeeH], but I suspect it's a fake. No one with this guy's reputation could be confirmed, even if he walks on water. He'd get crucified in the nomiation process:
President Barack Obama is expected to nominate Jesus Christ, an immigrant originally born to a virgin mother in Bethlehem, to fill the new vacancy on the Supreme Court. Although Mr. Christ is over 2,000 years old, He is immortal, so Democrats and…
revere | April 24, 2010I know things are better when I read really weird stories like this one:
Earlier today, we told you about a Pennsylvania legislator who accused her primary opponent of pretending to be bisexual in order to get votes from the large LGBT community in her Philadelphia district.
At a fundraiser a week ago, state Rep. Babette Josephs (D) told supporters that they couldn't trust her opponent, Gregg Kravitz, not to cheat at the polls. He had lied before, she said.
"I outed him as a straight person," she said, "and now he goes around telling people, quote, 'I swing both ways.'" (Rachel Slajda, TPM)…
revere | April 23, 2010Everyone knows that people commonly use the internet for health information. "Commonly" means almost half (45.6%) of adults over 18 who were interviewed by the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) during the first 9 months of 2009. The estimate is made from household interviews of a national sample of adults who don't live in institutions, like a nursing home, school or prison (euphemistically called a correctional facility). The question asked by the NHIS was: "Did you look up health information on the Internet in the past 12 months?"
The percentage by age group is fairly even, except for…
revere | April 22, 2010It was a year ago today we put up our first post about swine flu: "The California swine flu cases." I think we were the first blog to notice it, and it began this way:
Late yesterday afternoon a Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) Dispatch appeared on CDC's website that is unique in my experience. MMWR is usually heavily vetted and edited and nothing gets out of there fast. Indeed, in recent years, nothing at all got out of CDC very fast. And yet here is this Dispatch, with text referring to the same day of issue (April 21), reporting on two young patients with febrile respiratory…
revere | April 21, 2010Yesterday we posted on our strong support for open access publishing of tax payer supported research. We are taxpayer supported scientists (at least our NIH grants are) and we consider our work to be the property of the public, who paid for it. Whenever possible (which is most of the time) we do publish in freely accessible journals. Making data freely accessible is more controversial, but we also support this, perhaps with a reasonable grace period to allow scientists to have priority for data they expended effort to collect and with reasonable safeguards for confidentiality and privacy when…
revere | April 21, 2010When two of the most loathsome members of the US Senate bring back again a bill that won't die, you'd think I'd be in high dudgeon. But I'm not. I hope the bill isn't killed or is allowed to die -- again -- and we finally get it. I'd much rather that the two right wing whack jobs, Senators Joe Liberman (morally corrupt Independent neé Democrat) and John Cornyn (morally corrupt Republican), spent their time sponsoring this kind of legislation than making their usual mischief that hurts everyone. What is this miracle legislation that brings me together with these usually worthless publicly…
revere | April 20, 2010The Icelandic volcanic eruption is still causing havoc in Europe with ripple effects elsewhere as people and planes are grounded for travel in or out of much of northern Europe. Pressure from the traveling public, air carriers and business is mounting to let passenger and cargo planes fly again. What's changed? Not much. There's about as much uncertainty as there was a week ago, just a lot more pushback. The recriminations are already starting: EU and national transport authorities "over reacted." They should have ... done what? At the same time airlines like Air France-KLM are conducting…
revere | April 19, 2010When I was young there was a brief fad for 3-D movies. You had to wear those red/green glasses they gave you in the movie theater but the effects were pretty spectacular. I remember seeing Vincent Price in House of Wax and it was pretty impressive to my 11 year old psyche. But 3D faded. Something about those goofy glasses, maybe. Now it's back and the glasses are still part of it but much fancier. They are now high tech active motion glasses and they not just for theater 3-D, either (as in Avatar). 3-D television is making its debut.
I've not seen the new 3-D movies or the TVs but Mrs. R.…
revere | April 18, 2010With health care costs growing without bounds, the medical devices industry and President Obama are hard at work. Not hard at work reducing costs. Hard at work convincing us that the solution to the cost crisis is more technology. Right, Mr. President. And John McCain is a maverick and Sarah Palin is a genius. Almost everyone else believes advanced technology is a significant driver of health care costs and the idea that it will drive down costs is not just a fantasy but steaming pile of crap. That doesn't mean there's no room for innovation to lower costs. On the contrary:
Nobody knows…
revere | April 18, 2010Some things are pretty hard to swallow. You know what I mean:
See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.
revere | April 17, 2010It would be surprising if failure to fund local public health and neutering regulation would result in a decrease in foodborne illness. Alas, there is nothing surprising about CDC's latest report on incidence of foodborne illness in the US. They put the best face on it they could, pointing to a decrease in E. coli O157H7 cases, but they've seen that kind of progress in E. coli before only to slip back.
In reality we aren't sure how much food poisoning occurs each year. Most of it is self-limited and never comes to the attention of medical or public health authorities. It never gets counted.…
revere | April 16, 2010This was in the news a couple of weeks ago, but I held on to it so I could remind people of it again, the "too big to nail" syndrome":
Imagine being charged with a crime, but an imaginary friend takes the rap for you.
That is essentially what happened when Pfizer, the world's largest pharmaceutical company, was caught illegally marketing Bextra, a painkiller that was taken off the market in 2005 because of safety concerns.
When the criminal case was announced last fall, federal officials touted their prosecution as a model for tough, effective enforcement. "It sends a clear message" to the…
revere | April 15, 2010When CBS-TV decided to run an anti-abortion ad during the Superbowl there was a lot of talk about the propriety of airing highly polarizing advocacy advertising in such a highly visible media slot. There has been less talk about the content of the ad beyond the obvious fact it was making an implied argument against abortion. Since I wrote a pro abortion post yesterday I was thinking about the issue and thought I'd revisit the ad from a different point of view, the weird (but common) anti-abortion counterfactual argument.
First a brief summary of the ad. Tim Tebow is a talented college…