revere | August 19, 2006Another possible Indonesian cluster in a remote West Java village is being reported by fragmentary news sources.
One report has it that a 35 year old woman has died in Cikelet, a village where a 9 year old girl and and a 17 year old male are confirmed cases. The male's 20 year old cousin died of presumed bird flu but was buried without being tested. The two cousins worked together and were said to have been infected when they fed dead chickens to dogs. The girl may have been a near neighbor. The new case would be fourth, but there is as yet no clear relationship to any of the other cases.…
revere | August 18, 2006Another bird flu death has occurred in the same village where two other cases were recently reported. This one is a nine year old girl. The others were the 17 year old we discussed in a recent post, who left the hospital against medical advice and is reported to be recovering at home, and his deceased 20 year old cousin. Cikelet village is in West Java, 990 km from the city of Bandung. Authorities say the village is rife with bird flu, with dead or sick chickens common (Reuters).
Health authorities say they are on top of this outbreak, have taken blood samples from neighbors and relatives and…
revere | August 17, 2006In the days -- and weeks -- following the frantic rescue work after the destruction of the World Trade Center, the US EPA reassured everyone there was no harm from breathing the dust and fumes from that catastrophe. We now suspect this was quite wrong and EPA should have known it from the outset. Studies of Ground Zero rescue workers are beginning to show significant pulmonary function deficits and many workers are symptomatic. Since there was no registry of workers, unraveling the effects will be difficult, but there is an official commission and scientific studies under way.
Now we are…
revere | August 16, 2006A helpful reader (hat tip to easy hiker) sent along a story from New Scientist concerning a new report in The New England Journal of Medicine. The NEJM paper is a case series of six subjects who almost died as a result of a clinical trial of a monoclonal antibody being tested as a drug for rheumatoid arthritis. Within an hour of receiving the drug, TGN1412, all six suddenly developed a cytokine storm syndrome, with severe pain rapidly developing to multiorgan failure and respiratory distress. This result was unexpected as nothing like it had occurred in the animal trials and the dose given…
revere | August 15, 2006Whatever is going on in Thailand, everybody seems uncomfortable with it. After being praised by WHO for its bird flu measures because the country had not reported cases since last December, the virus has come roaring back, as if to remind us it isn't going to be so easy. Which most of knew, of course. Now WHO is telling Thailand to reassess the bird flu program it had formerly lauded:
The World Health Organisation (WHO) on August 9 warned the government to urgently review measures taken to control the H5N1 bird flu virus, both in poultry and humans, to tackle the spread of the disease in the…
revere | August 15, 2006The most recent human case of bird flu in Indonesia raises some extremely interesting questions. Here are the facts.
A 17 year old farmer, named Umar Aup, in a remote province of West Java became seriously ill with an influenza-like disease after he and his cousin collected the carcasses of about 100 chickens from their backyard flock that had died suddenly. They fed the dead chickens to dogs. The cousin took ill and died of a disease that appeared to be bird flu but he was buried before any testing could be carried out. Aup also became ill and was admitted to a hospital last Wednesday but…
revere | August 14, 2006I'll give the UK and US governments the benefit of the doubt for the sake of argument (even though they are both world class liars) and assume the alleged hair-gel terror plot is real. The response to it is still monumentally stupid. So what do I know about hair gel? Nothing. I don't use it.
But I vaguely recall a Kurt Vonnegut novel whose plot went something like this (I might be making some of this up; I have no access to library materials where I am at the moment). A childless man, living in a suburb where everyone had families felt left out so he decided to have some of his own. But he…
revere | August 14, 2006India has declared itself avian flu-free. Unlikely, but technically correct, at least in the sense of the definition of the Office International des Epizooties (OIE, the World Organization for Animal Health).
India first detected highly pathogenic avian influenza H5N1 in its poultry flocks earlier this year (2006):
Outbreak of bird flu was first reported on February 18 in Navapur and Uchchal districts of Maharashtra and Gujarat.
Further outbreak was reported in Jalgaon district of Maharashtra and it spilled over to the adjoining areas of Madhya Pradesh.
The last outbreak was detected on April…
revere | August 13, 2006You shouldn't be reading this, because the blogs are fluorishing but poor network TV is languishing. The middle of July saw its least viewed week in the history of broadcast TV in the US (via Boingboing):
CBS, ABC, NBC and Fox averaged 20.8 million viewers during the average prime-time minute last week, according to Nielsen Media Research. That sunk below the previous record, set during the last week of July in 2005. (AP)
The network news shows didn't do that great, either:
"World News Tonight" averaged 7.3 million viewers and "Nightly News" had 7.2 million (both 5.1 rating, 11 share). The "…
revere | August 13, 2006From war hero to atheist pariah.
Pat Tillman was a pro football player who gave up his career to enlist in the Army after 9/11. He went to Afghanistan and was killed in combat, his death an icon for the patriotic fervor that served the neocon debacle perfectly. But Pat Tillman turned out to be an embarrassing disappointment for the flag wavers. For one thing, we now know that after he got there he came to the conclusion the war was "fucking illegal." Then we found out he had been killed by American bullets.
Not that we'd know any of this from Pentagon sources. It's his family that has pushed…
revere | August 12, 2006There can be no doubt that the combatants in the battle between Hezbollah and Israel engulfing southern Lebanon have lost all moral credibility. Both sides are waging a war without any regard for innocent human life, except insofar as it is regard for the public relations problems it causes.
The conflict across the border between Lebanon and Israel has now displaced up to 1 million people in Lebanon, of which nearly 700 000 are living in temporary accommodations, and another 220 000 are in Syria, Jordan, Cyprus and the Gulf area. Addressing the vital needs of the displaced and other affected…
revere | August 11, 2006The venerable and slightly right-of-center (but excellent, nonetheless!) British publication, The Economist, has taken note of the Indonesian decision to release the bird flu sequences. [NB: also see Addendum, after the continuation below the fold. The Peiris and Guan labs in Hong Kong are now fully open on sequences. Kudos to them. Additional note: Excellent article by Helen Branswell here on the same subject.]
"For the sake of basic human interests, the Indonesian government declares that genomic data on bird-flu viruses can be accessed by anyone." With those words, spoken on August 3rd,…
revere | August 11, 2006In many cities we are out of parking spaces. We could restrict cars, but that would be un-American. So we find ways to cram more and more cars into the same space. That's what a new breed of robotic parking garage does. Cars are stored on top of each other on automated lifts that can move the cars along three independent directions, shuffling them up, down and sideways. It can even learn the usual times of drop off and pck up and shuffle the cars dynamically so they are closer to an easy pick up level. Twice as many cars can be accommodated in the same space and pickups take on average 30…
revere | August 10, 2006China now admits what everyone knows already knows. It had a death from H5N1 in November of 2003, a full year before its "official" first case (The Guardian). In fact everyone also knows that there was H5N1 in February of that year when the disease was diagnosed in Hong Kong in a family just returned from a visit to Fujian province. That occurred at the outset of China's now infamous SARS cover-up. As interesting, the Chinese explanation for why the case not been reported earlier, was it had been misdiagnosed as a SARS case. This may in fact be what happened but it raises another question:…
revere | August 10, 2006The lull in bird flu is over. At least the lull in the news about bird flu. The virus didn't go away. Editors got tired of it and national agricultural officials were quiet about it. Now Thailand is again engulfed with poultry infections and experiencing human cases and Indonesia continues to percolate away with both bird and human cases. In both countries the endemic poultry problem is the underlying cause.
"When you have trouble controlling infection among the chicken flocks, you are naturally going to see continuing infections among humans," Dr. Anthony Fauci, the US National Institutes of…
revere | August 9, 2006The Indonesian government has given permission to release the sequences of some 40 or so H5N1 viruses isolated from human cases in that country to publicly accessible gene databases. The US CDC has now removed any password protection preventing general access at the Influenza Sequence Database at Los Alamos National Laboratory and has indicated the sequences will also be deposited in the US National Library of Medicine's database, GenBank.
The move to put the data in the public domain, giving scientists from around the world free access, came after the Indonesian government told the World…
revere | August 9, 2006For a country that claimed to be bird flu free just a month ago, things seem to have changed rapidly in Thailand:
The government Tuesday declared twenty nine central and northeastern provinces, including Bangkok, as disaster zone as part of measure to curb bird flu, government spokesman Surapong Suebwonglee said.
The cabinet also approved the creation of chicken "death squads" responsible for terminating infected birds as well as all poultry within a one-kilometer radius of any future bird flu outbreaks.
[snip]
The government also issued strict safety measures for another 30 provinces,…
revere | August 8, 2006Some people are likely to formulate a simple strategy for bird flu. Get rid of the birds. Here's a cautionary tale:
An attempt to control pigeons at a hospital escalated into a hazardous material incident as sick and dying birds falling from the sky forced a temporary shutdown of the emergency room.
"Birds were coming down like dive bombers," said Schenectady Fire Chief Robert Farstad.
There were no reports of illness or injury from the incident Thursday evening at Ellis Hospital, but several people went through decontamination after emergency crews discovered the poisoned birds.
The…
revere | August 8, 2006An astounding 2000 people die of rabies every year in China. There might be a reason why they don't have mandatory vaccination of dogs there, and if some reader knows, tell the rest of us in the comments. Meanwhile the Chinese authorities in Jining are attacking rabid dogs the way we recommend countries deal with bird flu: by killing all dogs within three miles of a rabid one. Jining has had 16 rabies cases in the last 8 months. This is the second mass dog killing to control rabies in China. For those of us with dogs, it is very distressing prospect and I won't try to defend it here except to…
revere | August 7, 2006It's a region where three major religions and various ethnic groups compete and pursue ancient grievances. It's a bad place for a war because things can easily spin out of control. The incident that sparked it all, the killing of two people by a terrorist, happened earlier in the summer but by the end of July it had started a war, with exhilaration and foreboding on both sides. There was regret over loss of life, yes, but it was balanced by the conviction the war would be short and just. All the previous wars, going back over 40 years were short, after all. More importantly, there was the…