revere | July 28, 2006It seems the dam has broken in Thailand as far as talking about possible bird flu. For nine months the Thais have been saying their aggressive culling strategy has been working to keep H5N1 at bay. We and others have wondered if the virus was just flying beneath the Thai radar, despite official denials. Even this month, as reports were increasing of poultry deaths and suspect human cases agriculture officials were saying, "no problem." Then the virus was confirmed to be in chickens and shortly thereafter the first confirmed death since last December was acknowledged, a 17 year old Thai boy…
revere | July 27, 2006Influenza/A viruses naturally infect aquatic wildfowl like ducks and there are a lot of influenza/A subtypes besides the H5N1 that has been in the news. Some people are heavily exposed to wild ducks, namely serious duck hunters and game handlers. Why don't they get infected with some of the other influenza virus subtypes? It turns out nobody has looked to see if they do until now. In a paper just published in CDC's journal, Emerging Infectious Diseases scientists from the University of Iowa and St. Jude's Children's Hospital report that on occasion it is possible to see evidence of infection…
revere | July 27, 2006The human bird flu vaccine news from pharma giant GlaxoSmithKline sounds good and it probably is. Probably. There is a lot we don't know yet as the results have not been published in the open medical literature. Here's what GSK is claiming.
First, they claim to have produced a vaccine that raises antibodies in 80% of the test subjects (400 Belgians) with a very small amount of viral material (antigen), 3.8 micrograms given twice (7.6 micrograms, total). Previous attempts to make vaccines against H5N1 have required much more antigen. Because our ability to produce viral antigen in eggs is very…
revere | July 26, 2006You've probably never heard of bronchiolitis obliterans and you certainly don't want to have it. The name tells the story. The bronchioles are the smaller airway tubes that transport oxygen and carbon dioxide to and from the portions of your lungs where the gases are exchanged in the blood. If you obliterate those small tubes, well, you figure it out. The condition is debilitating and sometimes fatal. As I said, you don't want it.
Want it or not, that's the fate of dozens of workers in factories that make manufacture microwave popcorn or the artificial butter flavor that goes into the popcorn…
revere | July 26, 2006It's nice we have straightened out Afghanistan. No more nasty Taliban.
The Department for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, which is the formal name for the religious police who enforced strict, conservative Islamic law during the 1990's, is being reinstated by President Karzai's government, according to Afghan officials.
Although crackdowns on forms of expression deemed un Islamic have generally come from the courts, and although conservative Islamists are currently the main block in Parliament, this initiative came from the President's recently approved Cabinet. (Pak…
revere | July 25, 2006Avian influenza is capable of infecting mammals other than humans. Like domestic cats. Cats are companion animals ("pets") in Europe and North America and live as closely with humans as birds do in Indonesia, southeast asia and China, perhaps even more closely. They are thus potential bridge vectors from birds to humans, contracting the disease by eating birds and then nestling with people. So far there have been a number of reports of naturally acquired infections probably from birds to cats and from cat to cat but not yet from cats to humans. The possibility that cats might be involved in…
revere | July 25, 2006The return of H5N1 to Thailand we were pretty sure was underway has now been confirmed. Our real question is whether it is new or just poking its head above water after having been there all along without being "detected." We put that in scare quotes because we suspect the surveillance system in Thailand isn't very sensitive, so its alleged absence over the last year is suspect.
Poultry deaths have been reported to outsiders for about a month, but the authorities have been denying H5N1 was involved. Thailand is blaming imports from neighboring countries and has instituted an import ban.…
revere | July 24, 2006If you want a summary of all that is wrong with Indonesian bird flu policy, here it is:
The huge territory and people's ignorance had hampered Indonesian health authorities' efforts to eliminate bird flu, Indonesian Vice President Jusuf Kalla said on Friday.
Since the government launched massive efforts to combat the spread of the virus a few years ago, many chicken and bird traders and owners have been reluctant to kill their belongings which were found infected with the H5N1 virus, due to the lack of knowledge about the danger of virus and the consideration that about ten U.S. cents…
revere | July 24, 2006That pharmaceutical giant Hoffman-La Roche would have trouble meeting the orders it received for its antiviral Tamiflu was well known and not a surprise. Roche's manufacturing method is said to be laborious, dangerous in spots and have a long production cycle (NB: shorter and cheaper methods have since been discovered but it isn't clear anyone is using them to make Tamiflu at this point; see our post here). So it has surprised and upset many to see the drugmaker marketing Tamiflu to businesses, essentially inviting them to move to the head of the line.
With only a fraction of the doses needed…
revere | July 23, 2006China is reporting more bird flu in chickens, this time in the northwest province of Xinjiang (India News). It is Thailand, however, that is attracting attention because of the alleged lull in reported cases from there along with praise the country has received for its seeming success in curbing the disease in birds. Some of us have been cautious in our judgment, however, and now others within Thailand are voicing skepticism that the picture is so rosy.
Amid mounting reports of irregular poultry deaths in many areas, leading virologist Professor Prasert Thongcharoen expressed strong doubts…
revere | July 23, 2006Last week's Sermonette was about the joy of the apocalyptics that the Middle East conflagration signaled the End Times. This week we turn to Robert Frost's version, and address it with all due respect to our fellow human beings in Israel and Palestine:
Fire and Ice
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
Robert Frost (1874-1963). From Harper's magazine, December 1920
revere | July 22, 2006Time to update everyone on the status of banned blogs in India. Allegedly the bans are coming off, and the worldwide outrage is part of the reason, IMO. As interesting, is the backstory as it is now coming out in the Indian press.
The whole episode started when a hard right American website, ExposingTheLeft.Blogspot.Com, made a couple of snide comments about Iran and slammed Hizbollah. This was along with their usual tripe about same sex marriage and the other bogey men of the whacko US right wing, but nothing out of the ordinary for day to day Fox News watchers. There were a bunch of other…
revere | July 22, 2006Indonesia has come under strong criticism because its agriculture department has been unable to cope with the avian influenza epidemic in its backyard and commercial poultry. Among other things, Indonesia doesn't have an effective mandatory surveillance program for the infection in birds. Guess who else doesn't have one?
The U.S. Agriculture Department's failure to develop a "comprehensive" program to monitor for bird flu could leave the country unprepared if an outbreak happens, a bipartisan group of senators said on Friday.
In a letter to Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns, six lawmakers…
revere | July 21, 2006The world's leading science journal, Nature, has been hitting editorial home runs lately. This week it's a real prize, "Safety catch." The subject is the Bush administration's proposals for how the government should go about conducting risk assessments.
Risk assessments are a sensitive topic with many consumer and community groups who have experienced them as elaborate exercises in government decision justification. There is so much latitude to how the knobs of the risk assessment machine can be tweaked to make the output come out right, that many people see the process as one where the risk…
revere | July 21, 2006The US Food and Drug Administration is celebrating its centenary, but a good proportion of its scientists are not so thrilled with what it has become. The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) just released a survey of 997 FDA scientists, co-sponsored by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility to a total of 5918. This is not the world's best response rate, so the results can't be claimed representatives. But what it revealed is disturbing in itself. One hundred eighty three scientists in this sample reported they "have been asked, for non-scientific reasons, to inappropriately exclude…
revere | July 20, 2006It sounds trivial but it isn't. What to do about pets in the event of a disaster. We saw in the Katrina evacuation how failure to take separation anxiety of pet owners into account created a major public safety problem. People were unwilling to leave their dogs, cats and other pets behind and if told they couldn't take them, they refused to leave. This problem has been known by sociologists and others studying disasters for decades but disaster planners don't bother to consult the literature, it seems. Now, with the problem highlighted on CNN for a week straight, there is finally legal…
revere | July 20, 2006CDC has disgorged $225 million to state and local health departments for bird fluhttp://www.dhhs.gov/news/press/2006pres/20060711.html. That's some good news, made better by the fact that these phase II allocations seem usable for a wider range of public health needs than bioterrorism or bird flu, narrowly conceived.
The money goes to help states pay for activities above and beyond what they normally provide, said Joe Posid of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which distributes the money.
"They'll use the CDC funds for more macro or public health purposes such as…
revere | July 19, 2006We've beaten up enough on poor China for its transparent attempts to control information within its borders. Time to beat up on poor India.
From Boingboing:
India's Department of Telecommunications (DoT) passed an order to ISPs Friday to block several websites. The list is confidential. Indian ISPs have been slowly coming into compliance. SpectraNet, MTNL, Reliance, and as of Monday afternoon, Airtel. State-backed BSNL and VSNL have not started yet but likely will soon. The known list of blocked domains is *.blogspot.com, *.typepad.com and geocities.com/*.
Yes folks, the Indian government…
revere | July 19, 2006It's not news the nation is having a heat wave although it is making the news, as temperatures in the nineties and above were reported in city after city, from one coast to the other and in between. Good opportunity to talk physics and physiology.
Your body is a prodigious producer of heat, which you can see just by thinking about the food you consume. To be charitable to you and your lack of gluttony, let's say you consume 2500 Calories a day. A Calorie is a measure of the chemical energy released in the form of heat when the organic material in the food is burned. These are large calories (…
revere | July 18, 2006The ultra right US House of Representatives has voted to lift some restrictions on embryonic stem cell research and the Senate will likely follow suit, maybe as soon as today (New Scientist). The bill effectively zeroes out a five year ban on federal financing of stem cell research by allowing researchers to use federal grants to use embryonic stem cells dervied from surplus embryos produced by in vitro fertilization that would otherwise be destroyed.
Currently it is very difficult for academic researchers to do any embryonic stem cell research because the only allowed cell lines (derived…