revere | December 24, 2006It's not just Sunday, but it's Christmas Eve. Time for my annual In Praise of Christmas Sermonette. Because, yes, I am a big fan of Christmas. As a proud member of the godless, I am not a bit embarrassed or chagrined. As far as I'm concerned, it's a lovely secular holiday. I'll explain why, but I also know the winter holidays can be a difficult and sad time for many people. The darkness of the season and the emotional freight of family associations contributes, no doubt. My views are not even shared by everyone in my own family. So this is not meant to be why everyone should like Christmas.…
revere | December 23, 2006The newswires are humming again with another story of the estimated toll a flu pandemic might exact, if it were as bad as 1918. This time the occasion is a paper just published (.pdf) in the British medical journal, The Lancet, which attempts the most careful estimate yet of the toll of the 1918 epidemic. As often happens, the headlines, and in some cases the contents of the articles are all over the place. Some examples: "Bird Flu Can Kill 62 Million People", "New flu pandemic could kill 81 million", and "Study Finds Much Bird Flu Planning is Misplaced." We took a look at The Lancet article…
revere | December 22, 2006The Revolving Door. Round and round she goes, where she stops, no one knows.
On January 15, Dr. Scott Gottlieb leaves the FDA as Deputy Commissioner for Medical and Scientific Affairs, returning to his old haunts at the ultra conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI). Gottlieb was at FDA for about a year and continued to practice medicine on the side, while there. Very demanding job. Practicing medicine. (See posts here and here.)
His replacement has just been announced by newly confirmed FDA Commissioner Dr. Andrew von Eschenbach. It is Randall Lutter, Ph.D., who will serve as Acting…
revere | December 22, 2006If you were wondering what happened to bird flu, you can ask the people in Vietnam, South Korea and Nigeria. The virus doesn't care if you know where it is or not. It just keeps going about its business, making copies of itself, using whatever hosts are around whose genetic and protein copy machines it can hijack for its own use. With all the talk about "where's bird flu?" it is useful to remind ourselves it's still around. And flu season is just starting:
Nigeria:
Bird flu reached every region of Nigeria, Africa's most populous nation, after government inspectors found infections in three…
revere | December 21, 2006Americans have never been good at saving. Especially, "saving themselves for marriage."
Almost all Americans have sex before marrying, according to premarital sex research that shows such behavior is the norm in the U.S. and has been for the past 50 years.
The new study shows that by age 20, 75% of Americans have had premarital sex. That number rises to 95% by age 44.
Even among those who abstained from sex until 20 or beyond, 81% have had premarital sex by 44, the survey shows. (WebMD Medical News)
The data come from four cycles of the National Survey of Family Growth, done between 1982 and…
revere | December 21, 2006This week President Bush signed the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act (S. 3678). It has generally gotten favorable reviews from public health professionals concerned with preparedness, including the Clinicians Biosecurity Network and The Trust for America's Health. We've taken a look, too, and find much to like, but whether this will indeed be useful will depend on how it's implemented. We have a few observations of our own, as well.
The law has four Titles, each dealing with a separate but related topic. Title I. pertains to " National Preparedness and Response, Leadership,…
revere | December 20, 2006A Boston man, the head of an elite Anti Terrorist Unit, has become the first person ever charged by the US Department of Justice with committing torture abroad. Charles "Chuckie" Taylor is being held in Miami. Surprised? Didn't think the US would move against one of its own citizens for flagrant human rights abuses and war crimes even though there has been a federal law (18 USC sections 2340A and 2441) that allows them to be charged in the US? After all, no one has ever been charged before.
Of course, there are some special circumstances here. Chuckie Taylor is the son of Liberia's deposed…
revere | December 20, 2006Vietnam is once again reporting bird flu in chickens and ducks after no reports in poultry or humans since November of last year. I have not posted what I have been thinking during this lull, because I had no evidence to support it. But in truth I have suspected the virus has been quietly percolating away there beneath the radar screen. No reported outbreaks or cases doesn't necessarily mean the virus is absent.
I still have no evidence. But the virus has poked its head above water again:
At a conference held Tuesday by the National Steering Committee on Bird Flu Control, Cao Duc Phat,…
revere | December 19, 2006Science and justice have been on trial in Libya and both have lost. Today a Libyan court again condemned five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor to death by firing squad after a retrial widely seen as unfair because it excluded exculpatory scientific evidence (see here and here and links therein).
An international legal observer, Francois Cantier of Lawyers Without Borders, promptly criticized the retrial as lacking scientific rigor. Research published this month said samples from the infected children showed their viruses were contracted before the six defendants started working at…
revere | December 19, 2006I've debated (with myself) whether to post anything about disgraced columnist Michael Fumento's rantings that bird flu was a "Chicken Little" story (literally: it's entitled, "Chicken Littles were Wrong"). It was published in the far right rag, Weekly Standard, where Science is a dimunutive figure in the far distance, but now it's been picked up by Yahoo and other outlets, so I guess I'll have to bite the bullet and say something about this sleaze.
Why am I attacking him instead of what he wrote? I'll get to that in a minute, but first let me continue my egregious ad hominem ways. Fumento is…
revere | December 18, 2006One of the most important tools in the fight to reduce emissions of toxic agents into the environment has nothing to do with emission controls. It has to do with information. Since 1984 Americans have had access to information about how much individual companies were emitting into their neighborhoods via a publicly accessible database called the Toxic Release Inventory (TRI). The Bush Administration is again trying to weaken it, after unsuccessfully proposing new rules that would only require companies to report every two years rather than annually. Now they want to raise the threshold for…
revere | December 18, 2006I like stories like this. If there is a pandemic, while some places will do very badly, many places will find a way. I say "if there is a pandemic," but if you are poultry producer in southeast asia the pandemic has already happened, where it is a panzootic, a pandemic in animals (in this case birds). Thailand has one of the largest poultry export sectors in the world. When H5N1 hit Thailand, its sixth largest poultry producer, Sun Group was in trouble. Twenty-five countries in the EU, almost its sole market, put a ban on fresh chicken imports from Thailand, leaving it without customers and…
revere | December 17, 2006We continue our summary of the Institute of Medicine "Letter Report" on non-drug non-vaccine measures to slow or contain the spread of an influenza pandemic of a severity similar or worse than that of 1918 (see previous post on models here). The IOM report examined several analyses of historical data from 1918 to see if it was possible to obtain information on the effectiveness interventions on the pattern of outbreaks in various cities in the US. It is well known that both timing and severity varied a great deal in that pandemic. The goal was to see if differences in morbidity and mortality…
revere | December 17, 2006I don't watch much network TV and I certainly don't watch Charlie Sheen's new show, Two and a Half Men. So I didn't know that the Christian Right is going bonkers over his mocking of Christ, Christmas and Christians earlier this week. At least that's their version.
Apparently what he did is sing his own version of a Christmas Carol:
"CBS approved Sheen's adaptation of the favorite Christmas carol, making it into a vulgar sex song," said Donald E. Wildmon, Chairman of AFA, in a statement. "The network and sponsors paid Sheen to mock Christ, Christmas and Christians. Many in the Christian…
revere | December 16, 2006The verdict in the Tripoli 6 case is scheduled to be handed down on December 19. There has been worldwide recognition the science now shows the six defendants arrived in the country after the viral strains were circulating in the hospital and its environs, making the 400+ cases of HIV infection in children in the Benghazi Hospital in Libya most likely the result of poor hospital hygiene.
Not that you'd know it from the Libyan news media:
Bulgarian nurses are guilty, evidence show
2006-12-14
It's a big crime. More than Libyan 400 children were deliberately infected with HIV at Benghazi…
revere | December 16, 2006On December 11, The Institute of Medicine, one of the four constituent parts of the National Academies of Science, released a "letter report" reviewing the scant information on effects from non-drug measures to slow or contain spread of an influenza pandemic (available as a free download here). The report was produced after a special workshop on October 25 in which the panel participants heard from a variety of experts, with subsequent deliberations that produced the summary letter report and its recommendations.
"Letter Reports" are mini-versions of the full IOM treatment where a specially…
revere | December 15, 2006The Bush Administration hates science. Science is reality-based and some truths are politically inconvenient. But there are things that can be done. Like this:
The Bush administration is clamping down on scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey, the latest agency subjected to controls on research that might go against official policy.
New rules require screening of all facts and interpretations by agency scientists who study everything from caribou mating to global warming. The rules apply to all scientific papers and other public documents, even minor reports or prepared talks, according to…
revere | December 15, 2006There are many local stories about pandemic flu planning and they all sound pretty much the same. Local officials saying they are making good progress but there's still much left to do and if a pandemic struck they'd be in trouble. Yawn. But every once in a while you read one where you say to yourself, "Some of this has sunk in. They're asking the right questions." Not often, or at least not often enough, but when we started talking about this no one was asking questions like this:
Meals on Wheels delivers 850 meals a day in Rockingham County [New Hampshire], relying on 35-40 drivers and…
revere | December 14, 2006The FDA has announced that Scott Gottlieb, their guy in charge of science, is leaving, headed back to his spiritual home, The American Enterprise Institute, denizen of right wing ideologues and other apologists for do-nothing government. As the American Enterprise Institue describe themselves:
The American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research is dedicated to preserving and strengthening the foundations of freedom--limited government, private enterprise, vital cultural and political institutions, and a strong foreign policy and national defense--through scholarly research, open…
revere | December 14, 2006Last week we posted on the Canadians realizing that if a a pandemic hit, even a moderate one, their hospital system would be in deep feces. This week it's the US's turn. Not that this is news, exactly, but it bears repeating. Again. And again. And again. So here's the message. Again:
Half of all U.S. states would run out of hospital beds within the first two weeks of a moderate flu pandemic and 47 states would run out if a bad one hit, according to a report issued on Tuesday.
The report from the Trust for America's Health shows the United States is still poorly prepared for a pandemic,…