revere | October 23, 2006It's an influenza vaccination program's worst nightmare. In Israel, four elderly and chronically ill patients have died of cardiac arrest within days of receiving influenza vaccinations:
Israel suspended flu vaccinations nationwide on Sunday after four men who had been inoculated died in the past week, the Health Ministry said.
"I ordered to stop the vaccinations until things are made clear," Israeli Health Minister Yacov Ben Yizri told reporters.
"We have started to investigate everything related to this case," he said. The ministry said it had asked the French firm Sanofi-Aventis, which…
revere | October 22, 2006Back in September Janet at Adventures in Ethics and Science challenged Sciencebloggers to a nerd-off. I didn't take part because I have an inherent sense of fairness. Professionals shouldn't compete with amateurs. So I let it go. But now I want to claim my rightful crown from the usurper.
In that competition Orac at Respectful Insolence declared himself the übernerd on the basis of a long list of supposedly nerdish things, like the kind of tchotchkies in his home office (a 12" model of the Incredible Hulk, a replica two-handed sword, etc.) and that he learned to program in Fortran, not…
revere | October 22, 2006I have a lot of hope for the new generation. My students are wonderful, smart, committed, politically savvy. Much better than the two generations that preceded them, the dead period between the sixties and now (don't take offense; I know a lot of you are, and were, smart, committed and politically savvy during that time, but, let's face it, most of your colleagues were a bit, shall we say, self absorbed?).
An article in the New York Times gives me further cause for optimism. The evangelical movement is losing the youngsters:
Despite their packed megachurches, their political clout and their…
revere | October 21, 2006It seems like you can't turn around these days without seeing another vaccine story on the wires. Novartis has announced its cell culture vaccine technology has successfully passed its clinical trials and is preparing for regulatory approvals. Instead ofusing eggs to grow the vaccine seed strain, Novartis is using dog kidney cells which are permissive for influenza virus growth. By-passing eggs allows freedom from a precarious pathogen-free egg supply and faster start-up time from when the pandemic strain is identified. Novartis says it has successfully scaled up production methods and plans…
revere | October 20, 2006We've said it here often, but it's nice to see it in the commercial print media.
Less than a year ago, Americans could barely turn on the television, surf the Internet or pick up a newspaper without finding a doomsday story about deadly avian flu.
By last November, President Bush had asked Congress for $7.1 billion to help develop a vaccine, stockpile antiviral medications and fund state preparations for a possible pandemic.
Now, with the disease still centered in Asia and the failure of migratory birds to spread the illness to Europe and North America, the H5N1 virus has dropped out of the…
revere | October 19, 2006You may have heard of sequestered juries in the courtroom but probably you haven't heard of sequestered science. Sequestered science is the name given by the project on Scientific Knowledge and Public Policy (SKAPP) to scientific knowledge concealed from the public. [Full disclosure; I am personally acquainted with the SKAPPers]. Last year they held a scholarly conference on the subject. It is published in the journal Law and Contemporary Problems and you can download the papers for free at the SKAPP site.
It's not that there aren't reasons to keep some kinds of science from public view, for…
revere | October 19, 2006There's a report on the wires that scientists at the Vaccine Research Center (VRC) at U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases have developed a DNA vaccine that protects mice against the reconstructed 1918 virus. The paper just appeared online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS, also known as "penis" in the trade). At this point the paper is more important for what it reveals about how the mouse immune system protects against this notorious virus than as a demonstration of a vaccine technology for use in people. That is much further down the road.…
revere | October 18, 2006There's a lot of good regional reporting around that most of us don't get to see. Consider the Sun Herald in gulfport, Mississippi. We think of Gulfport as Katrina country these days, but like the rest of the world in 1918 it was pandemic flu territory. Local reporter Kat Bergeron looked back nine decades to that other catastrophe and concluded there are still a lot of missing puzzle pieces.
Nearly nine decades after the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic swept across the Mississippi Coast - and every country in the world - researchers and health officials continue to study and revise death tolls.…
revere | October 18, 2006A paper has just been published that is a real wake up call. I am stunned more of us didn't think about this sooner.
We all remember the Tamiflu frenzy that ensued in 2004 when people first realized the bird flu train might be coming down the tracks. There was a great deal of talk about how Tamiflu (oseltamivir) was the only antiviral capable of saving someone from the virus and it was in short supply. So many people started to stock up:
Fears of an outbreak of bird flu led Americans to hoard the anti-viral medicine Tamiflu in 2005, with prescriptions spiking most sharply when media coverage…
revere | October 17, 2006Lindsay at Majikthise notes that Dear Leader has signed the torture bill, with these words:
"It is a rare occasion when a president can sign a bill that he knows will save American lives," Bush said. "I have that privilege this morning."
Bush signed the bill in the White House East Room, at a table with a sign positioned on the front that said "Protecting America." He said he signed it in memory of the victims of the Sept. 11 attacks.
"We will answer brutal murder with patient justice," Bush said. "Those who kill the innocent will be held to account." [AP]
Some observations. Yes, it has been…
revere | October 17, 2006Bird flu has claimed 55 people in Indonesia, with the death of a 67 year old woman. The world's fourth most populous nation (after China, India and the U.S.), Indonesia has had 72 cases since June 2005 and the most deaths (WHO). Only Vietnam has registered more cases (93 cases), but fewer deaths (42) (WHO).
A look at this bar chart shows how the epicenter of human bird flu has shifted from Vietnam (clade 1, Vietnam southeast asia, magenta color) to Indonesia (clade 2, Indonesia, yellow color). You can also clearly see the start of the new flu season. The chart does not include the three most…
revere | October 16, 2006The Onion Radio News (audio clip) carries a story about sharing research results, a matter that has received quite a lot of attention on this site. We think their version is just about right.
revere | October 16, 2006This story ("Scientists close to neutralizing all flu types") continues to circulate and frankly, I don't understand why.
British scientists believe they are close to finding a way to stop all flu viruses --including the deadly H5N1 virus, known as the bird flu.
Researchers at Warwick University say they have found a way to turn the flu virus against itself.
Although the research is still in its preliminary stage, the results are a source of optimism for the medical community concerned about the global spread of bird flu.
"We're very close. The lab data are as good as they can be. It works…
revere | October 15, 2006Our Flu Wiki partner, DemFromCT, has an important post up at DailyKos today. In June of 2005, Dem (The Next Hurrah), Melanie Mattson (Just a Bump in the Beltway) and The Reveres joined forces in an experiment in community public health planning we called The Flu Wiki. We were joined by our tech guru, the blogger, pogge (Peace, Order and Good Government, eh?), and after a time by anon_22. Anon_22 was "just another" wiki participant who chose her name arbitrarily, not thinking she would become a central figure. Based in the UK, she is a physician and soon became deeply engaged in the…
revere | October 15, 2006Here it's Sunday and you are sinning! At least according to Kevin D. Denee of the Restored Church of God's Ambassador Youth magazine (h/t Cruel Site of the Day). God hates blogs:
In the last five years, a new phenomenon has developed. The Internet has given birth to a world within a world. Now millions around the globe have their own websites, where they detail their lives, interests, opinions, random thoughts, and much more.
[snip]
Should teenagers and others in the Church express themselves to the world through blogs? Because of the obvious dangers; the clear biblical principles that apply…
revere | October 14, 2006The Campaign to free the Tripoli Six is entering a new and dangerous phase. On October 31 their trial resumes, with a death sentence again looming. For those not familiar with the case, The New York Times today summarized the situation in a strongly worded editorial:
Five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor are facing the death penalty in Libya based on preposterous charges that they deliberately infected hundreds of children with H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS. This looming miscarriage of justice demands a strong warning to the Libyan leader, Muammar el-Qaddafi, that his efforts…
revere | October 14, 2006We have been asked on many occasions why a public health blog spends so much time discussing war. The implication is that war is "off-topic." There are many reasons why we disagree. Here is one.
A Coroner in Oxford, England has officially ruled that a British journalist who died in Iraq in 2003 was unlawfully killed by American forces.
Oxfordshire Assistant Deputy Coroner Andrew Walker said he'll be writing the director of public prosecutions to seek to bring the perpetrators to justice.
"Terry Lloyd died following a gunshot wound to the head. The evidence this bullet was fired by the…
revere | October 13, 2006Instead of putting this as an Addendum to today's post, I'll let it stand by its ignominious self. Thanks, Canada.
Background:
The Rotterdam Convention is a multilateral environmental agreement designed by a United Nations agency to protect vulnerable populations by ensuring that hazardous chemicals which are added to the Prior Informed Consent (PIC) list can only be exported with full disclosure and documentation. Although five types of asbestos were PIC listed in 2004, action on chrysotile asbestos was blocked by asbestos stakeholders including Canada, China, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and India…
revere | October 13, 2006A paper to be presented today at the annual meetings of the Infectious Disease Society of America, but following a familiar pattern the results have been presented in a press release. The news is modestly good, but the emphasis should be on modestly.
The paper reports work that took advantage of a group of people who were vaccinated with two doses of an experimental bird flu vaccine in 1998, shortly after the first human cases in Hong Kong. The viral strain of H5N1 used then was of a lineage (or "clade") different than the ones used in the recent spate of vaccine trials from a lineage…
revere | October 13, 2006Many years ago I received a call on a Sunday morning from Canadian Broadcasting asking if I would be on their live weekend radio show. They were scheduled to interview the Canadian Minister of Mines (or some such title, I forget what) about continued Canadian exports of asbestos. One of the things I used to joke about was that the asbestos industry and their allies would say anything, including asbestos was so safe you could eat it for breakfast. It was a joke. I thought.
Because this Canadian official got on the radio and said (I heard it with my own ears) that Canadian asbestos was safe and…