revere | July 18, 2006If you are a US citizen unfortunate enough to get caught in a war zone, don't expect much from the US State Department. Or at least don't expect anything if you can't pay for it:
A message to the American citizens in Lebanon:
The Department of State continues to work with the Department of Defense on a plan to help American citizens depart Lebanon. As of the morning of July 15, we are looking at how we might transport Americans to Cyprus. Once in Cyprus, Americans can then board commercial aircraft for onward travel. Commercial airlines provide the safest and most efficient repatriation…
revere | July 17, 2006Our wiki partner and blogiste extraordinary, Melanie, is back at Just a Bump in the Beltway. Note the new URL and new look.
Her absence over the last week was a result of a Trackback spam attack that took her down. Now that she's on a new MT build we hope she'll not have the problem again.
If you've not been to Bump before, now's the time to hop over and show her a little blog love. Melanie was one of the pioneers in the blog world and for some time has been publisher and a Forum moderator at The Flu Wiki, our sister project.
Welcome back, Melanie. We missed Bump.
revere | July 17, 2006An interesting Commentary on the problem of releasing the flu sequences has been posted on the blog Anthropologique by its proprietor, J. F. Brinkworth. I disagree with it, but he makes some pertinent points.
Brinkworth believes WHO is not at fault for failure to release the Indonesian sequences and he provides some information of which I, and probably most others, are not aware:
Indonesia has very, very stringent nucleic sequence I.P. laws. All genetic material recovered there is their property. Their Convention of Biological Dviersity Law No.5 (1994) and Cultural Practices Law No. 12 (1992…
revere | July 17, 2006Indonesia has now done in one year what it took Vietnam three years to "accomplish": rack up 42 deaths from bird flu . Indonesia and Vietnam are now tied for the most number of deaths from the disease, although Indonesia did it with fewer cases, a reflection of the fact the case fatality ratio in Indonesia is 78% (42/54), while in Vietnam it is 45% (42/93).
The latest case is a 44 year old male who died on July 12 after being hospitalized with fever and respiratory difficulties of two days duration. He lived in a Jakarta suburb and was "reported to have had contact with birds." Whether this…
revere | July 16, 2006The last thing little Lizzette Peña ever did in this world was to climb up to get a toy atop the family's 37 inch TV. It fell and crushed her skull, killing her.
Freak accident? Maybe, but there are a lot just like it. Lisette lived in Houston, where the staff of Memorial Hermann Hospital there is familiar with the problem.
In the past year, at Memorial Hermann Hospital alone, there have been 11 injuries from falling televisions. In the past four months, five of those have resulted in death. The extent of the problem at other Houston-area hospitals could not be determined at press time.
The…
revere | July 16, 2006Maybe you think a bird flu pandemic will be a world destroying event and maybe you don't think so. Most people who read this site, however, fear a pandemic. There are others, though, for whom a really bad pandemic is just the ticket. They are the "End Times" religious groups, and all of the Big Three western superstitions have them. More (if you can handle it), below the fold.
. . . mega-church pastors recently met in Inglewood to polish strategies for using global communications and aircraft to transport missionaries to fulfill the Great Commission: to make every person on Earth aware of…
revere | July 15, 2006The frozen chicken from China story has a follow-up. You may remember that a warehouse full of the chicken was found in Detroit although import is banned to the US because it came from an area where there is bird flu. An unstated amount of the meat was already in commerce in restaurants and retail stores. If you live in Detroit, you probably haven't received a recall notice, however:
Health officials have begun contacting restaurants and markets supplied by a Troy warehouse suspected of importing Chinese poultry, but there was no plan Thursday for alerting the retail customers of Asia Food…
revere | July 14, 2006Indonesia has sacked its animal health official in charge of bird flu (BBC). The Government of Indonesia has said his departure was a result of a routine rotation of personnel. Right. And George Bush is really one of the Andrew Sisters.
This is clearly a lie and is stupid on two counts. The first is that no one with more than two neurons would believe it. The second, because if it were true it would be even stupider. Why would you take an experienced and competent person and routinely rotate them out of their job?
At any rate, we know Sjamsul Bahri's departure is not likely to make that much…
revere | July 14, 2006Whenever we talk here about immunity from lawsuits for Big Pharma I hear a lot about so-called frivolous lawsuits. Those aren't the lawsuits that are clogging our court system since only about 10% of lawsuits are tort actions. But I'll concede one thing: there is such a thing as a frivolous lawsuit.
Two of the biggest practitioners of frivolous lawsuits are Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). RIAA has sued more than 20,000 music fans allegedly for file sharing. Grandmas, sub-teens and people who don't even own computers have…
revere | July 13, 2006Declan Butler, senior correspondent at Nature, has a particularly infuriating news article today, infuriating because of the attitude it reveals from WHO, CDC and the Indonesian government about releasing information about influenza they alone are privy to. The main points of the article revealing more details of the genetic sequences of the large Indonesian cluster of eight related people in Karo, Sumatra in Indonesia have been known for at least a month, although never publicly released before Butler's article. Presumably he obtained the information from the same sources we and others did.…
revere | July 13, 2006We've been carrying on about sanctimonious disloyal Democrat Joe Lieberman for quite a while here. Now Connecticut voters have caught on, too, and Holy Joe is in a world of hurt in the Democratic primary race as he battles political neophyte Ned Lamont. According to print and broadcast media outlets the race is all about Iraq and Joey's unflagging support of Bush in everything he does and unstinting criticism of anyone who disagrees with Bush. But Iraq is only a part of the anti-Joe sentiment in Connecticut. Our posts have dealt principally Joey's equally unstinting support of Big Pharma and…
revere | July 13, 2006If you are worried you'd have to go all the way to China to eat chicken from a bird flu endemic area, worry not. You can just go to Detroit.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture worked with the Michigan Department of Agriculture on a raid at a Troy warehouse. Investigators found chicken, goose and pork products from areas in China affected by bird flu, Local 4 reported.
USDA investigators seized more than 1,600 pounds of illegally imported poultry and pork products, the station reported. Most of the products were mislabeled and put in boxes that read frozen tilapia, according to the report.
"…
revere | July 12, 2006In my salad days I had the privilege of team teaching with a brilliant neuroscientist at one of the world's most famous research institutions. In the fifties he had published, with a famous co-author, a foundational paper about peripheral information processing in vision. He was also a brilliant lecturer, giving without notes, spellbinding and seamless narratives full of impressive erudition. He had devoted graduate students and was married to a beautiful woman, a well-known personality on the local educational television station (this was before PBS). There was only one fly in the academic…
revere | July 12, 2006So here I am, stuck at the airport with no internet connection. Don't ask me why. I am showing a signal, but this has been the Trip from Hell, so I'm not surprised. It should have been easy. One hour flight time, nice hotel on the waterfront, all day meeting with interesting people discussing laboratory security policy, hop on the plane, home in another hour. It should have been easy. So far it hasn't been.
I got to the airport early to discover Delta had canceled my flight, the last Delta flight of the evening. Don't wait in line at the service desk, the helpful attendant told me. Use the…
revere | July 11, 2006The national bird flu plan is quite explicit in its promises to local public health. There aren't any. The plan is, "you're on your own." Fair enough. A pandemic happens everywhere so there's no "outside" to send help from. But how well prepared is local public health? Bush has given them the power and supposedly provided them with money to handle bioterrorism attacks. That should have been some help. It wasn't.
Unfortunately what the left hand giveth, the Right Hand taketh away. From Cape Cod, Massachusetts:
But budget cuts over the past few years, coupled with a lack of staff, have left…
revere | July 11, 2006In the first six months of 2006 the number of countries detecting infected birds has doubled. Case fatality remains extraordinarily high. And limited human to human transmission, with at least one moderately large cluster is becoming more evident. WHO continues to say most human infections come from poultry, although the evidence for this is not conclusive. Many cases have scant or no history. The feared easy person to person transmission has yet to occur, but the virus is not standing still. It continues to change genetically and move into wider and more varied niches. Sixty countries are…
revere | July 10, 2006So what does my Scienceblogs colleague, Dr. Tara Smith of Aetiology know anyways? So she's got an advanced degree and is a practicing epidemiologist. How could she be so smart if she writes stuff like this?
Those of you who have followed creationism/intelligent design literature over the years have probably felt as if you're living in an alternate universe sometimes. In that literature, many times it seems as if "up" means "down" and "highly supported by the evidence" means "a theory in crisis."
[snip]
Phylogenetic analyses based on genetic mutations are used to determine relationships for…
revere | July 10, 2006The leaders of the G8 meet this weekend in St. Petersburg (aka Leningrad aka Petrograd) and they were supposed to announce a business-friendly scheme to get drug companies to make vaccines for the developing world. Looks like it isn't going to happen, though, because the US and France are arguing over whether the US will back a French proposal for an international airline ticket tax to pay for aid to poor countries (Wall Street Journal). Germany and Japan are also balking at contributing to the plan, so there it sits, despite former claims of support by all parties:
The situation marks a…
revere | July 9, 2006The White House heaved a sigh of relief a few weeks ago upon being told it wouldn't undergo a lobotomy by having Bush's Brain indicted, although we still don't know if Karl Rove struck a deal with the prosecutor to send his former pal, Scooter, Down the River.
Not as big a story, however, is that Bush is going to get his voicebox replaced. The news of the laryngectomy came last week with the resignation of longtime speechwriter and evangelical wingnut, Michael Gerson.
The effect of Gerson's departure could be monumental not only in light of the comparison between Bush's scripted and…