revere | August 7, 2006There is an AP story circulating in Florida newspapers that IBM Corp. and The Scripps Research Institute want the federal government to pony up $500 million for some of their research on computer models to track the spread of bird flu. Why Florida? Because they also want Palm Beach Country and the city of Boca Raton to fork up $20 million to put their supercomputer facility in Boca Raton.
I guess what I would most like to say to the IBM Corp. and The Scripps Research Institute is this:
are you out of your fucking minds? $500 million dollars? And another $20 million that could be used for…
revere | August 6, 2006There are a lot of ways to kill someone without meaning to. For example, not caring whether they die or not if you can make a buck. We do it a lot in the US and the same is true elsewhere. In the UK they are having a few second thoughts.
The government will today resolve a long-running internal battle by introducing a corporate manslaughter bill in the Commons, making companies liable for any deaths due to a general breach of the duty of care by the firm.
Tony Blair made a fresh promise to introduce the corporate manslaughter bill at the Labour party's national executive meeting on Tuesday…
revere | August 6, 2006Sunday in the US. Since Australia is an 18 hour time difference I'm not exactly sure what day it is down there. But it doesn't make much difference because whatever day it is, the young folks are probably not in church.
Or so says a new study, The Spirit of Generation Y (Gen Y are those born between 1976 and 1990). The survey was a joint project of Monash University, the Australian Catholic University and the Christian Research Association.
Yes, there's hope yet for the younger generation, at least in Australia. Less than half believe in a god, with 20% outright atheists and another 32%…
revere | August 5, 2006Indonesia is making its sequences available to the world scientific community, at long last. We aren't going to ask how or why or continue to chide them for keeping the sequences until now. We applaud their decision to do so and urge others to follow their example.
"I've learned that scientists across the world have complained that they could not access the data and made statements as if we had hidden it," Health Minister Siti Fadilah Supari told a press conference here Thursday.
"For the sake of basic human interests, the Indonesian government declares that genomic data on bird flu viruses…
revere | August 4, 2006On August 8 - 10, 2005 county mosquito control in Sacramento, California aerially sprayed the pyrethrin pesticides with piperonyl butoxide (PBO) over 85 square miles. On August 20 - 22 they did it again, this time covering 104 square miles. Their objective was to kill adult mosquitoes that carried West Nile Virus after two dozen cases of the disease appeared in area residents. Use of pyrethroids with PBO is common for mosquito adulticiding. There is a general belief the pyrethroids are relatively benign, although there is not much data. The addition of PBO as a knockdown agent has come under…
revere | August 4, 2006A dead swan in a Dresden, Germany zoo signals the return of bird flu to that country (AFP). It is not the only locale where the disease is reappearing after a lull. Laos and Thailand have cases in birds and Thailand has just registered its second death in a week, a nine year old girl. Several more cases are hospitalized and over a hundred are on a watch list because of symptoms that might indicate infection (Reuters).
Vietnam is looking on with worry.
Deputy Agriculture Minister Bui Ba Bong said bird flu, which erupted across much of Asia in late 2003, often hit Thailand first and broke out…
revere | August 3, 2006Karo, Indonesia is back in the bird flu news. Another village in Karo district was the scene of the largest human bird flu cluster to date (eight cases, seven of whom died). Human to human transmission was grudgingly acknowledged by WHO as occurring in this case, although Indonesian health authorities still resist it. Now it is the site of seven more suspect cases, including at least one family cluster.
"Whether it is a new cluster or not, that must be scientifically proved," said Runizar Ruesin, head of the bird flu information centre at Indonesia's health ministry.
He said the seven were…
revere | August 3, 2006We've gotten pretty used to the idea that if H5N1 appears in birds it is legitimate to slaughter birds wholesale within a certain distance of the infected flock. In the west, birds are kept as caged pets by some people but not huge numbers. In Indonesia and other countries, however, birds are the kinds of companion animals that dogs and cats are here. Keep that in mind when you consider this story.
In southwest China three people have died from rabies after being bitten by dogs. Rabies is a pretty bad disease. Once you start exhibiting symptoms it is essentially a death warrant (yes, I know…
revere | August 2, 2006I have now had a chance to read the PNAS paper by Maines et al. and it is surprising in two respects. The first is it isn't that interesting. The second is related to the first. Why did they bother to hold a press conference about it? Even more, why did the press conference focus on the reassortment question when that didn't establish much. Anyway, that's how I read it. Here are my reasons.
The most important part of this paper is methodological, testing a ferret infection model for transmissibility. Ferrets have been used as a reasonably good biological model for infectivity and virulence in…
revere | August 2, 2006Thailand seems to have gone from "no bird flu in the country" two weeks ago to having the whole nation on alert.
As the number of suspected bird-flu cases increases nationwide, Thailand Agriculture Minister Sudarat Keyuraphan declared Monday (July 31) all 76 provinces of the country animal epidemic control areas, with stricter rules on the transport of poultry and handling of dead birds.
The move follows the mass culling of 300,000 chickens at 78 farms in Nakhon Phanom province on the weekend. (The Nation [Thailand])
Even more interesting is that they are following a godawful number of people…
revere | August 1, 2006The long awaited reassortment experiment where the 1997 H5N1 virus was combined with a seasonal strain of human H3N2 virus is being reported today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS, known colloquially amongst scientists as "penis"). As of this writing I was not able to get a .pdf so all I know is what is being reported on the newswires as a result of a press conference held by CDC Director Gerberding and a co-author of the study, Dr. Jacquiline Katz of CDC. It's hard to know the real significance of this work until we see the actual paper but here is the synopsis as…
revere | August 1, 2006The most successful armies learn from their adversaries. There is no doubt Hezbollah is an enemy of public health. We'd say the same of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), but it's Hezbollah which has more to teach public health. Here's what we're getting at.
The New York Times has an excellent story about how the vaunted military might of the IDF has been checked by the disciplined fighters of Hezbollah fighting in their own villages. This shouldn't be a surprise but people have bought the myth of IDF military invincibility, just as they bought the myth of US military invincibility before Iraq…
revere | July 31, 2006I noticed that Governor Mitt Romney, Republican presidential hopeful and much despised Governor of Massachusetts, just vetoed $8.15 million in funding for addiction treatment and prevention in his state. I'm not an expert on substance abuse issues, but I know it is an area of public health where we are in real trouble because of budget cuts. I have written quite a lot about bird flu here and the need to address it by strenghtening the public health infrastructure. Substance abuse is part of that infrastructure. But what, if anything, does cutting these programs have to do with bird flu? I…
revere | July 31, 2006A reminder it's not just bombs and bullets in Lebanon:
BEIRUT. July 29 (Interfax) - The World Health Organization (WHO) fears an eminent humanitarian disaster in Lebanon, and the quality of drinking water is among its greatest concerns in the current situation, a WHO official in Beirut told Interfax Saturday.
"There is also the threat of epidemics, as there could be people under the ruins," the WHO official said.
"All this, as well as the terrible sanitary conditions in the refugee camps, could further provoke outbreaks of various epidemics," he said.
The WHO is…
revere | July 30, 2006We've posted about this before (here and here) when it was still in the middle distance, but now it's a disaster just over the horizon. It's the National Uniformity for Food Act (S.3128) (aka The Food Industry Protection Act), poised to become law if it passes the US Senate. It is a blunderbuss aimed at California's Proposition 65 which requires warnings for food ingredients that may cause cancer or birth defects. If it passes it will take down that state law and another 220 or so other state and local safety and labeling laws as collateral damage. The food industry won't mourn those little…
revere | July 30, 2006Sunday is a quiet time to relax, read the papers, listen to music on the radio. If you live in Fresno, try KFYE-FM. Not interested, because last time you listed to it there was nothing but Christian music, sermons and Bible stories? Tune in again. As of last week it's now Porn Radio: "all sex radio, all the time" (AP).
Yes, indeed. You can now listen safely without worrying your neurons will initiate a programmed cell death routine. No more anti-gay songs and sermons. Now it's Marvin Gaye's, Sexual Healing (one of our favorites, this being a public health blog and all).
Continuous one hour…
revere | July 29, 2006Yesterday we posted on the failure -- the refusal, really -- of Indonesia's Ministry of Health to release any of the human flu sequences or isolates. Indonesia is now the country with more fatalities than any other, having passed Vietnam for that dubious honor. We now learn via Declan Butler that Indonesia had also been withholding isolates from poultry.
Nature has learned that very few -- if any -- avian flu samples from Indonesian birds have been sent to official labs for sequencing over the past year.
The data blackout comes just as surveys of the country are revealing a startling number…
revere | July 29, 2006I think NY Senator Chuck Schumer is a jerk, so don't take this defense of him the wrong way. I still think he's a jerk. But this attack on him by the wingnut wrongosphere is just too stupid to pass commenting on:
The executive committee of the National Clergy Council, representing church leaders from Catholic, Evangelical, Orthodox and Protestant traditions, today calls on New York senator Charles Schumer to immediately apologize for his bigoted comments made yesterday on the floor of the US Senate.
Mr. Schumer referred to traditional Christians who object to the willful destruction of human…
revere | July 28, 2006The failure to have sequences from Indonesia made available to the world's scientific community continues to be a scandal. Whose doorstep to lay the blame? There would seem to be three possibilities: WHO, the scientists who do the sequencing, and the Government of Indonesia. An official from the government has already said they would consider a request for release favorably if one were made, but WHO admits they have yet to make one. Meanwhile, sequences often appear in GenBank upon publication of a paper. The available evidence, therefore, suggests WHO is guilty of not pressing the…
revere | July 28, 2006Forty-two scientists and two unions are asking OSHA to do something about popcorn workers lung, a serious, sometimes fatal respiratory disease called bronchiolitis obliterans associated with breathing diacetyl or diacetyl-associated fumes while working with flavorings like artificial butter in microwave popcorn manufacture (see our previous post here). The petitioners want OSHA to promulgate an Emergency Temporary Standard to cut extremely high exposures to diacetyl in manufacturing and product use workplaces. Over a million workers are estimated to be exposed to the compound.
OSHA has no…