revere | September 22, 2006The science blogosphere is responding magnificently to the dire circumstances of six medical colleagues, on trial for their lives in a courtroom in Tripoli, Libya. Declan Butler, Nature's senior correspondent who wrote the story in the world's premier science journal this week, is collecting the blogosphere links and stories over at the science social bookmarking site, Connotea. In less than 24 hours since we began to rally our colleagues in the blogosphere there have been more than 30, many right here in the Science Blogs stable, but also in some of the highest traffic blogs on the net:…
revere | September 22, 2006Trying to pick the most dysfunctional federal agency in the Bush administration is like trying to pick Bush's most vile idea. Where do you start? Since I've had some inside experience with it, I'll volunteer the Department of Veterans Affairs (the VA).
I need to cut them a little slack, of course. They are underfunded. There are two reasons for this. One is that the Bush neocons don't really care about soldiers after they have served their purpose, so they don't ask for enough money, by design. The other reason is that they also don't ask for enough money by virtue of stupidity. It seems that…
revere | September 21, 2006Nature is one of the premier scientific journals in the world. But they are also getting out in front on some important issues in their news and Editorials. They are fast becoming THE premier scientific journal in the world. Its chief rival, Science hasn't changed with the times. Nature has embraced the new medium of the internet in very innovative ways and continues to experiment with it. Nature is adapting successfully. Its rivals are being left in the dust.
Nature is published in the UK. So it is strange that they, rather than the US-based Science, has weighed in on the disarray at CDC,…
revere | September 20, 2006Nature's senior correspondent Declan Butler is one of the print science journalists who understands the internet and its power. He is now part of an effort to see if it can save six lives.
Lawyers defending six medical workers who risk execution by firing squad in Libya have called for the international scientific community to support a bid to prove the medics' innocence. The six are charged with deliberately infecting more than 400 children with HIV at the al-Fateh Hospital in Benghazi in 1998, so far causing the deaths of at least 40 of them. On 28 August, when the prosecution was scheduled…
revere | September 20, 2006Nick Zamiska had an interesting piece in yesterday's Wall Street Journal about the difficulty WHO is having encouraging a sense of urgency about a possible pandemic of avian influenza and the many other programs and problems with which they are daily engaged in a (literally) life and death struggle in many places in the world most of us have never heard of. The problem is made more difficult because of the roulette-wheel like nature of an emerging pandemic. We don't know when or if our number will come up or how much we should invest in the event it does. So far it hasn't happened, which is a…
revere | September 20, 2006Christie Todd Whitman, former EPA Administrator under Bush, scores points with some reality-based humans because she clearly is a GOP moderate. Which means, of course, she's solidly right wing. Still, that doesn't mean she shouldn't be trusted or respected. No, this means she shouldn't be trusted or respected. From the every reliable Jordan Barab at Confined Space:
I never thought much of former EPA Administrator Christie Todd Whitman, especially regarding EPA's fatally weak warnings about the hazards of the smoke and dust coming off the collapsed World Trade Center towers, and her inability…
revere | September 19, 2006[Warning: this post is fairly long and has a reasonable geek factor. It explores the question whether the virulence of H5N1 "must" moderate as the virus evolves.]
The high case fatality ratio of H5N1 (currently around 60%) is a reflection of how virulent this virus appears to be at the moment. Virulence is the ability to cause severe disease. The common cold virus and H5N1 both cause disease (both "pathogenic") but H5N1 is highly virulent, the common cold virus is not. The only thing a virus does is make copies of itself. It doesn't grow, it doesn't eat, it doesn't eliminate waste or move. It…
revere | September 18, 2006Another scandalous story about the CDC courtesy Alison Young's investigative reporting in the Atlanta Journal Constitution. It's about the unequal distribution of cash bonuses and the title says it all: "Science slighted in CDC awards."
As the CDC faces morale problems and the loss of key scientific leaders, the distribution of awards provides evidence, critics say, that the Atlanta-based agency is becoming more focused on management and bureaucracy and less on its public health mission.
The 72 CDC employees who received five or more awards of at least $2,500 from 2000 through July 21,…
revere | September 18, 2006Found in Fark with the tag, Ironic. Appearances to the contrary, it is not from The Onion:
BRITISH arms manufacturer BAE Systems is designing "environmentally friendly" weapons, including "reduced lead" bullets, "reduced smoke" grenades and rockets with fewer toxins, The Sunday Times said.
Other initiatives include developing armoured vehicles with lower carbon emissions, safer and more sustainable artillery and even recycling or composting waste explosives, the newspaper added.
"Weapons are going to be used and when they are, we try to make them as safe for the user as possible, to limit the…
revere | September 17, 2006Huge industrial style poultry farms, where birds are locked in cages in close quarters, are the perfect environment for disease spread. What about locked up people? Two million of them. Two million.
The US locks up more of its population than any nation on earth. By a long way:
This is not something we've always done in the US. It's shockingly recent, within the lifetimes of virtually everyone who is reading this. It really took off with the Reagan counter-revolution and has continued until today, slowing only because states can no longer afford it:
source: Crooked Timber
Since 1980 the…
revere | September 17, 2006The Pope is embroiled in a nasty mess over remarks he made in Regensburg, Germany, containing a quote from fifteenth century Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Paleologus, made to a Persian (Muslim) emissary. It concerned violence as a way to spread one's faith:
"Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached."
He's surprised the Muslim world is upset? Mrs. R., who is Catholic (lapsed, I'm happy to say), said her jaw dropped. OK, Pope Benedict XVI (neé Ratizinger) complains his…
revere | September 16, 2006The very first post, ever, on Effect Measure, "The Surgeon General as appetite suppressant" was posted in the morning of Thursday, November 25, 2004. I did it on a lark. Mrs. R. was preparing Thanksgiving dinner and my presence in the kitchen was declared unwanted if not a health hazard. What else was there to do but start a blog?
Since the Surgeon General has just resigned, quietly and without explanation, we bring you some nostalgic excerpts from that very first post and some remarks on his departure:
The United States Surgeon General has a new approach to the obesity epidemic specially for…
revere | September 15, 2006The spin, at least in the headlines, has been that a new study shows treatments for SARS didn't work. Some of the headlines are technically more accurate (e.g., SARS: No evidence that any of the treatments worked), but the impression from media reports remains that researchers found SARS treatments didn't work. In fact, however, that's not what the new study, published in PLoS Medicine, says.
By way of background, SARS is caused by a Corona virus (SARS-CoV). SARS is a frequently serious respiratory disease with prominent risk of acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) and features of an…
revere | September 14, 2006Whenever I hear about the latest H5N1 vaccine fix I have the same reaction. If only we'd started doing this several years ago when the threat of an avian influenza pandemic was plausible, we'd be so much farther ahead, if not "there" by now. But we didn't. CDC chased the bioterrorism phantom, to please King George, and Big Pharma was mainly interested in their obscenely profitable (and sometimes fatal) big items for aches and pains and impotence (oh, excuse, me; I mean erectile dysfunction). Oh, well. We'll take what we can get, now.
The latest is a live virus H5N1 vaccine from MedImmune, the…
revere | September 13, 2006Two members of the UN Security Council, China and France, broke with tradition last week and nominated candidates for the position of WHO Director General. In the past Security Council members have not had citizens in that post. China's candidate is Dr. Margaret Chan. She has a controversial history as health director in Hong Kong during the SARS and 1997 H5N1 outbreaks. Whether she is fairly or unfairly blamed is a matter of debate, but Karl Greenfeld's book on SARS, The China Syndrome, does not indict her particularly, although it has harsh words for the Chinese leadership. Our concern…
revere | September 13, 2006September 13, 1956 was an important date in computer history. That's when IBM shipped its first hard drive. As Steven Levy tells us in Newsweek, it was the size of two refrigerators and weighed a ton. Lot figurately. Literally. Leasing cost $250,000 a year (2006 dollars). But it was considered a wonder:
"It was about the size of two large refrigerators, about as tall as a person stands, and though it used vacuum tubes, it was always running," recalls Jim Porter, who worked at Crown Zellerbach in San Francisco in the mid-'50s and would proudly take people to the basement to see what he claims…
revere | September 12, 2006Over the weekend Menno de Jong and his many collaborators published a detailed clinical study of 18 H5N1 patients diagnosed and treated in Vietnam in 2004 - 2005 (Nature Medicine, subscription only). Thirteen of the cases died and five survived. Like many papers that have received media attention, it has important and interesting findings but has also been over interpreted, or at least its findings have been generalized too much. In this case, it is the fault of the authors.
de Jong et al. did virological and immunological studies in 18 bird flu cases and 8 other cases with the more usual…
revere | September 11, 2006Some stories just won't go away. Problems with transparency in China, an impotent government facing a bird flu crisis in Indonesia -- and morale, expertise and credibility going down the toilet at the US Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (aka CDC). Yesterday a very long article in the Atlanta Journal Constitution went over the ground again (hat tip to reader LG). The occasion was an unprecedented letter to CDC Director Julie Gerberding from five of the last six of her predecessors, sent last December:
An exodus of key leaders and scientists from the Centers for Disease Control and…
revere | September 11, 2006Most of us think of Percy Bysshe Shelley as a romantic poet concerned with love and beauty. He was, of course. But he was also a fierce fighter for liberty and foe of unbridled political power.
His target in this sonnet was King George:
England In 1819
An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king,
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn--mud from a muddy spring,
Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know,
But leech-like to their fainting country cling,
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow,
A people starved and stabbed in the untilled field,
An army,…
revere | September 10, 2006There are many ways to kill innocent people. Suicide bombings against Israeli and Iraqi citizens we hear about. The starvation and strangulation of a whole population is one we don't. From The Independent:
Gaza is dying. The Israeli siege of the Palestinian enclave is so tight that its people are on the edge of starvation. Here on the shores of the Mediterranean a great tragedy is taking place that is being ignored because the world's attention has been diverted by wars in Lebanon and Iraq.
A whole society is being destroyed. There are 1.5 million Palestinians imprisoned in the most heavily…