revere | August 30, 2006Katrina. One year later. Heck of a job, FEMA, Bush, Brownie, Chertoff and all of the Department of Homeland Security gang of fuck-ups and their bosses.
Some people think that Joe Lieberman's idea to put FEMA in DHS was a bad idea. But DHS is the right place for FEMA. Incompetent, screw-up agencies should always be grouped so it is easier to deal with them when a new administration comes along (we hope in two years). In the meantime . . .
DHS has a website, recently updated: Ready.gov. When the Federation of American Scientists first looked at it they thought it could be, well, let's say,…
revere | August 30, 2006I have a lot of tolerance for eccentricity as long as it doesn't hurt anyone. I'm a western physician who believes strongly in modern medical science, but I'm not as rabid and offended by alternative medicine as many of my colleagues. As long as it doesn't hurt anyone. Which unfortunately it frequently does. Take homeopathy.
The guiding principles of homeopathy are (1) "like cures like"; (2) remedies are taken in very low doses (one might say vanishingly low doses, like one part of remedy to a trillion parts of water); (3) there is a single remedy for every illness, although finding it might…
revere | August 29, 2006Here's a particularly worthless article from the AP: Docs say Tamiflu won't affect foetus.
This is clearly an important question. In the event of a pandemic, Tamflu will be used prophylactically in pregnant women, either by choice or because the women don't know they are pregnant. There is currently no reliable information on effects of this drug on a developing fetus, and there may not be before we are faced with the problem. So data points are useful. But this example is utter non-sense.
In Jakarta, Indonesian doctors are giving a 35 year old 2 months pregnant woman Tamiflu after she…
revere | August 29, 2006It's hard for a lot of us to understand how the rich get richer by giving money away, but here's one way.
Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt and his relatives have claimed millions of dollars in tax deductions through a type of charitable foundation they created that until recently paid out very little in actual charity, tax records show.
Instead, much of the foundation's money has been invested or lent to the family's business interests and real estate holdings, or contributed to the Leavitt family genealogical society.
The Leavitts used nearly $9 million of their assets to set…
revere | August 28, 2006Genetically modified cotton resistant to bollworm is a reality and five million Chinese cotton farmers have embraced it. It works, too, killing bollworm larvae that used to kill their cotton. IN the late 1990s it looked like a miracle. Pesticide use was cut by 70%. After seven years, though, the miracle is looking more like a curse because new pests called mirids have rushed into the pest vacuum and taken up shop.
"The farmers are very upset about it, because GM cotton was such a wonderful thing, and they don't understand why it won't work now," says Shenghui Wang of Cornell University in…
revere | August 28, 2006I have no doubt deciding who should get awards is a difficult business. Too many worthy candidates, only a few awards.
Still.
This week the 2006 Science-in-Society award winners were announced by the National Association of Science Writers (NASW):
NASW holds the independent competition annually to honor outstanding investigative and interpretive reporting about the sciences and their impact on society for good or ill. The 72-year-old organization of science writers recognizes and encourages critical, probing works in five categories: newspaper, magazine, broadcast, Web and book. The award…
revere | August 27, 2006Here's a great idea for your home. Install a sprinkler system that sprays pesticide mist twice a day, all summer long to control nuisance mosquitoes. The system uses quarter inch tubing a metal spray nozzles buried in the yard like a lawn sprinkler. A small tank and attached pump operate for 30 seconds at dawn and at dusk. The pesticides are pyrethroids, synthetic versions of a naturally occurring compound derived from chrysanthemums. The natural origin of pyrethrum is always touted as a sign of safety. If it grows in a chrysanthemum, it must be safe. Like botulinum toxin or the mushroom…
revere | August 27, 2006Nothing offends like the truth. From The Onion:
War-Torn Middle East Seeks Solace In Religion
August 23, 2006 | Issue 42â¢34
JERUSALEM--As an uneasy truce between Israel and Hezbollah continues, millions of average men and women in the Holy Land are turning to the one simple comfort that has always seen them through the darkest days of their troubled history: the steadfast guidance of their religious faith.
"I take solace in knowing that my faith is a sanctuary, an escape from the bloodshed and turmoil," said Haifa resident Yigal Taheri, who last week lost his wife and newborn daughter when a…
revere | August 26, 2006The headline -- U.S. border states preparing for pandemic flu threat -- sounded weird, but this is about some good ideas. The weird part was expecting this was about hardening the borders to keep bird flu out. In fact, however, it is about something much more sensible: the clear understanding that this virus doesn't care about political borders:
California and Arizona, two states bordering Mexico, are working together to address the emerging threat of an influenza pandemic.
California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano have co-sponsored a joint declaration at…
revere | August 25, 2006An excellent story from Bloomberg News by John Lauerman brings us up to date on an issue we raised yesterday concerning giving breaks on biologicals (like vaccines) to countries who deposit sequence data in publicly accessible databases like Genbank:
Poorer countries where bird flu is spreading may license virus strains isolated from their residents and poultry as a way to leverage better access to drugs and vaccines that come from studying those strains.
The plan is being advanced by a new program, announced today, that urges participating countries to place genetic information about their…
revere | August 24, 2006A new initiative on sharing avian influenza data has just been announced, called the Global Initiative on Sharing Avian Influenza Data (GISAID). This is the latest in a series of developments that have opened up influenza sequence data to the world scientific community to an unprecedented extent, a dawning recognition that the usual rules of scientific behavior and etiquette about who "owns" data need modification in the face of a potential devastating pandemic, where weeks or months head start on a scientific pathway can make an appreciable difference.
Last month Indonesia gave permission…
revere | August 24, 2006If you confront other people who think bird flu has gone away as a concern or read news articles to that effect, consider this. In April of this year there were 45 countries reporting infections in their bird or poultry populations. Now, four months later, there are 55. The UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) continues to warn us that the virus is spreading throughout Asia, Africa and Europe.
The number of confirmed human cases now stands at 240, with 141 deaths. The true number is likely larger, although how much we don't know. So far it is still small compared with the SARS…
revere | August 23, 2006Good news from CDC. Yesterday they announced immediate public release of some 650 influenza gene sequences. The new openness is part of a collaboration with the Association of Public Health Laboratories (APHL):
Through the new collaboration, CDC expects to provide genetic information for several hundred influenza viruses per year as a way to encourage more research on influenza. The sequence data will be available in nearly real time through Genbank, a public-access library for virus sequences managed by the National Institutes of Health, and through an influenza database housed at Los Alamos…
revere | August 23, 2006Recently we posted about pending legislation that would have gutted hundreds of state and local food safety laws. The argument was that the federal government could do this more consistently and eliminate the confusion of a patchwork of different laws. The patchwork would be eliminated all right. And the replacement would be all one color: white, as in whitewash.
Now the government's watchdog lapdog agency, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has sent a report to Congress on the food industry's compliance with labeling regulations in response to concerns about inaccurate nutrition…
revere | August 22, 2006With all the talk about non avian reservoirs for H5N1, a little talk about flies might be in order, not because we think they are vectors for H5N1 (so far no evidence of that), but just because we like to talk about them. The subject came up recently in a New Zealand Medical Journal article (authors B. Harris and W Nelson), about which we've only seen news reports (we are away from our home base library, on vacation, which is one of the reasons we are slow on comments and light on posting; using a slow dial-up is pure torture).
Anyway. Flies.
According to the New Zealand docs, flies and too…
revere | August 21, 2006The "fresh air" smell of a lot of air fresheners is really the smell of pollution according to a paper from scientists at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. That's because 1,4 dichlorobenzene (1,4 DCB), found in air fresheners, toilet bowl cleaners, mothballs and various "deodorizing" products, also causes modest decreases in lung function.
"Even a small reduction in lung function may indicate some harm to the lungs," said NIEHS researcher Stephanie London, M.D., lead investigator on the study. "The best way to protect yourself, especially children who may have asthma…
revere | August 21, 2006We had hoped to have better information about the possible cluster of bird flu cases in remote West Java, but the situation remains murky and unresolved. Nothing especially reassuring has yet happened to ease the discomfort of health authorities regarding whatever is happening there, at any rate. Reporting by The Jakarta Post is typical:
A young boy with symptoms of bird flu was rushed to Garut hospital in West Java on Saturday, raising the official number of people suspected of having bird flu from Cikelet village to 10 and pushing health authorities to widen an investigation into a…
revere | August 20, 2006Sometimes on Sunday I catch up on my backed up journal reading. High profile journals like Nature and Science are great except for one major defect: they come once a week, every week. They tend to pile up. So I browse them, looking for interesting articles or just satisfying my somewhat eclectic scientific interests. No surprise, with a Freethinker Sermonette due, the article by Miller, Scott and Okamoto, "Public Acceptance of Evolution" would catch my eye (Science 11 August 2006:Vol. 313. no. 5788, pp. 765 - 766):
Beginning in 1985, national samples of U.S. adults have been asked whether the…
revere | August 19, 2006WHO has taken note (.pdf) of the increasing genetic diversity of the H5N1 influenza/A viral isolates as the disease spreads geographically. Clades are genetically related viruses with common ancestors. Since 2003, two such clades have appeared (clades 1 and 2), distinct from the original H5N1 viruses from the 1997 Hong Kong outbreak (now called clade 3). Clade 1 viruses have been isolated in southeast asia (Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Laos), sandwiched between clade 2 viruses from southern China and Indonesia and Malaysia.
Until now, the experimental human vaccines have been made with seed…