revere | September 10, 2006The soul might not be immortal but the canard there are no atheists in foxholes seems unkillable. This particular piece of mythology goes back to a statement by U.S. Army Chaplain William Thomas Cummings just before the Battle of Bataan in 1942. If the Bataan Death March convinced anyone on it to believe in God who didn't already believe, well, God Bless Them.
In any event, the notion that when you are scared shitless you turn to God (not very complimentary to the newly converted, I'd say) raised its cartoonish head again at the 31st annual Armed Services and Veterans Affairs Awards of the…
revere | September 9, 2006It's just early September and already the number of confirmed cases of bird flu in humans has equalled that of all last year. And we are just entering flu season. Since the resurgence of the disease in late 2003 (four cases that year), there has been a steady escalation, with 46 cases in 2004, doubling to 97 in 2005 and as of today already 97 this year And it's only September. WHO now has recorded 244 cases since 2003, with 143 deaths (WHO).
Newspaper editors periodically tire of reporting on bird flu, or run stories that things are looking better, or that a vaccine has been devised. Many…
revere | September 9, 2006Science textbooks are expensive so one would think everyone would be happy about the free books being handed out to all students by the South Iron Elementary School in Annapolis, Missouri. Wouldn't you know it, some activist Federal judge stopped it:
A federal judge ordered a small-town school to suspend a program that gives free Bibles to students, saying it improperly promotes Christianity.
U.S. District Court Judge Catherine Perry also scolded school officials for continuing the program after warnings that it violated the Constitution.
South Iron Elementary in Annapolis, a town of 300 in…
revere | September 8, 2006In late July the American Psychological Association went in the same direction, but only a fraction of the distance, as the American Psychiatric Association and the American Medical Association by adopting a resolution prohibiting its members from engaging in or offering training in torture and establishes an ethical obligation for association members to report acts of torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment. (Chronicle of Higher Education)
This sounds like a strong statement but it fell short of both the APA and AMA policies, which do not allow participation in…
revere | September 7, 2006As promised, we have the full slate (13) of those running for Director General of the World Health Organization:
Dr. Kazem Behbehani (Kuwait); Dr. Margaret Chan (China); Dr. Julio Frenk (Mexico); David Gunnarsson (Iceland); Dr. Nay Htun (Myanmar); Dr. Karam Karam (Syria); Dr. Bernard Kouchner (France); Dr. Pascoal Manuel Mocumbi (Mozambique); Dr. Shigeru Omi (Japan); Dr. Alfredo Palacio (Ecuador); Pekka Puska (proposed by Finland); Elena Salgado (Spain) and Dr. Tomris Turmen (Turkey). (Canadian Press)
The CP story (no byline but likely Helen Branswell) also tells us the Executive Board (see…
revere | September 7, 2006Oh, yes, yes, yes. Oh sweet poetic justice. Oh joy, oh joy.
Last November, Shawn Hogan received an unsettling call: A lawyer representing Universal Pictures and the Motion Picture Association of America informed the 30-year-old software developer that they were suing him for downloading Meet the Fockers over BitTorrent. Hogan was baffled. Not only does he deny the accusation, he says he already owned the film on DVD. The attorney said they would settle for $2,500. Hogan declined. (Wired)
The motherfuckers at Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and Recording Industry Association of…
revere | September 6, 2006With all the talk of transparency, we learn that China has yet to share its avian flu isolates with the world scientific community. This is different than the sequence issue. China has shared its sequences, but the sequences don't tell the whole story. In particular, we are still not able to make the jump to biology, for example host range, virulence and tissue tropisms. Correlating the sequences with the biology is a critical scientific goal. For that you need the viruses themselves. And since 2004 the Ministry of Agriculture, despite promises to the contrary, has not shared its isolates.…
revere | September 6, 2006On Labor Day, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) issued a press release whose title summarizes its contents all too neatly: Bush Declares Eco-Whistleblower Law Void for EPA Employees. Here's some of it:
Washington, DC - The Bush administration has declared itself immune from whistleblower protections for federal workers under the Clean Water Act, according to legal documents released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). As a result of an opinion issued by a unit within the Office of the Attorney General, federal workers will have little…
revere | September 5, 2006CDC's Open Access journal, Emerging Infectious Diseases, has just published an interesting communication from an international team of scientists who surveyed Cambodian villagers in Kampot province immediately after a 28-year old male died of H5N1 infection in March 2005. The team also conducted poultry surveys to estimate the extent to which area birds were infected. The case was said to have handled and eaten sick birds. Medical histories, looking for febrile illness were taken within a week from over 350 villagers. Two months later blood specimens were obtained to see if neutralizing…
revere | September 5, 2006With the news of the tragic death of "Crocodile Hunter" Steve Irwin, stabbed through the heart by a stingray while filming a nature program, I was reminded of similar story. Well, maybe not so similar, because the victim was not a committed conservationist like Irwin, but a deep sea fisherman. Which makes a difference, at least to me, so I'm not sure exactly how to react to his. I'm not making fun of this. The human victim could easily have died. Still . . .
Ian Card, 32, was in stable condition at King Edward VII Hospital in the British Island territory from a wound that his doctor said…
revere | September 4, 2006Look, obesity is a problem. No denying it. But.
When the chairperson of an international conference (diabetologist Paul Zimmet from Monash University in Australia) tells a meeting of 2500 experts and health officials there is an "insidious, creeping pandemic of obesity [that] is now engulfing the entire world," and it is "as big a threat as global warming and bird flu," it kind of takes your breath away. (via Globe and Mail)
We talk a lot about bird flu here, so I won't bother to argue the inaptness (ineptness?) of the comparison. But obesity is as big a threat as global warming?
I - don't…
revere | September 4, 2006I brought this up once before and it got a negative reaction that surprised me. So I am prepared for more of the same. I am undeterred. So here it is: Cultured meat. I rather like the idea: growing meat in tissue culture.
From a (largely negative) article on Alternet:
Take some stem cells, or myoblasts, which are the precursors to muscle cells. Set them on "scaffolding" that they can attach to, like a flat sheet of plastic that the cells can later be slid off of. Put them in a "growth medium" -- some kind of fluid supplying the nutrients that blood would ordinarily provide. "Exercise" them…
revere | September 4, 2006A weird study of men's preference for filled out or thin women is said to show that hungry men prefer heavier women than satiated men.
[Researchers] recruited male university students as they entered or exited a campus dining hall during dinner time.
They asked the men to rate how hungry they were on a scale of one to seven. Using these responses, the researchers selected 30 hungry and 31 satiated men to take part in the study.
The men were then asked to rate the attractiveness of 50 women of varying weights, all within a healthy range, who had been photographed wearing tight grey leotards…
revere | September 3, 2006When someone found a dead rooster on his Manhattan apartment fire escape, the worried resident sensibly thought something was amiss and called police. If this were Thailand or Indonesia we might be thinking bird flu. But there was a vital clue pointing to a non-viral etiology: the rooster was missing its head.
This was a case for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. The trail soon led to a neighbor:
Humberto Rodriguez, 52, told agents that he bit the rooster's head off because he blamed it for injuring a pet pigeon that he also kept in the apartment, [ASPCA…
revere | September 3, 2006Sunday of Labor Day weekend. The Reveres are wending their way (separately) back to their home bases after a month on vacation (Mrs. R.:"Vacation? So how come you were blogging every day!"). Soon we'll be in the heaven of broadband after a month of dial-up. This heaven is here on earth, however, fiber optically speaking. Which brings us to our Sunday Sermonette, text by Joe Hill.
Joe Hill (born Joel Emmanuel Haggland in Sweden) is one of the U.S.'s most famous labor activists and songwriters. An organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, "the Wobblies") he wrote many songs, among…
revere | September 2, 2006As a blogger, I'm apparently in the minority in more ways than one (I speak here as one of the Reveres and for myself only). A telephone survey done by the Pew Internet and American Life project estimates that half of bloggers are below the age of 30 (not me, alas), are interested in blogging as a form of self-expression (not me, alas), documenting personal experiences or sharing practical knowledge (not usually) or just keeping in touch with friends and family (like they read our blog, right?). More than half live in the suburbs (nope) and are equally split between men and women (the…
revere | September 1, 2006WHO has just issued case definitions for H5N1 infections. Case definitions are criteria that must be satisfied to designate a person as being "a case" of H5N1 infection. Case definitions are not clinical tools but epidemiological ones. Epidemiological measures pertain to populations and require the ability to count cases and at risk populations. For example, a case fatality ratio (sometimes incorrectly called a case fatality rate) is the percentage of people infected with H5N1 that die from the disease. A case definition is necessary to determine the denominator, those infected with H5N1.…
revere | September 1, 2006The Thai newspaper, The Nation, is reporting that Thai researchers will soon report in the CDC journal Emerging Infectious Diseases a case of a dog infected with H5N1 after it was fed infected poultry. The current Indonesian cluster in the hamlet of Ranca Salak in the subdistrict of Cikelet, Garut, West Java involved two male cousins (ages 17 and 20) who fed dead chickens to dogs. There is no information on the dogs in this instance, but we know that cats who eat infected fowl can become infected.
This is not a particular surprise, but it emphasizes again that the mammalian host range for…
revere | August 31, 2006No young man likes to be embarrassed in front of his mother, especially in the delicate matter of sex.
But this story is beyond belief:
Madin Azad Amin was stopped by officials on Aug. 16 after guards found an object in his baggage that resembled a grenade, prosecutors said.
When officers asked him to identify it, Amin said it was a bomb, said Cook County Assistant State's Attorney Lorraine Scaduto.
He later told officials he'd lied about the item because his mother was nearby and he didn't want her to hear that it was part of a penis pump, Scaduto said.
He's been charged with felony…
revere | August 31, 2006An article in the current issue of Annals of Internal Medicine again raises the issue of passive immunization to treat H5N1 using plasma from recovered cases (Eurealert). The idea is that antibodies against H5N1 in the convalescent blood of a recovered case would be therapeutically effective. This is an old idea and was tried in the 1918 flu pandemic. The current paper is said to be confirmed by a handful of uncontrolled studies published ninety years ago during that catastrophe. The idea certainly has biological plausibility.
It also has the feeling of an act of desperation. The logistics of…