revere | July 9, 2006Less than a week ago we posted on an impending public health emergency in the embattled Gaza strip region of Palestine, where a relentless Israeli assault had cut off much of the population from water and power at the height of summer heat. The warning came from our friend, Palestinian doctor and social justice activist, Dr. Moustafa Barghouti (this is not the Barghouti currently being held in an Israeli jail). Things have deteriorated further and UN aid agencies have joined in the urgent warnings. From Reuters:
U.N. aid agencies said on Saturday that Gaza was on the brink of a public health…
revere | July 8, 2006The world's pre-eminent scientific journal, Nature, has once again taken notice of blogs. I say "once again" because Nature has consistently been out in front in recognizing that blogging has come to science, not just science to blogging. Senior correspondent Declan Butler has his own blog and was the first science journalist in a high profile journal to call attention to blogging, which he did in dramatic fashion by penning a faux blog set in the near future describing an avian influenza pandemic.
Declan has now produced a list of the top five science blogs and a supplemental list of…
revere | July 7, 2006Use the Comments for your entries. Winner gets a free subscription to this blog.
From Modern Mechanix, 1937.
revere | July 7, 2006Todays' theme is education. Be sure to enter the Science Education Caption Contest in today's other post. This one is not about science education. It's about peddling soft-core pornography to pre-teens in a popular children's magazine, Cobblestones.
What began as an attempt to educate middle-school students about the military has set off a string of complaints from parents and teachers that new learning materials designed by a New Hampshire publisher for 9- to 14-year-olds amount to little more than an early recruiting pitch for the Army.
The latest issue of Cobblestone magazine, distributed…
revere | July 6, 2006And I thought my prescription drugs were expensive. The US government has just announced it was exercising its option to buy 20,000 treatment courses of ABthrax (raxibacumab) from Human Genome Sciences. That's $8250 a pop. It will go into the Strategic National Stockpile.
This drug is for inhalational anthrax, a disease practically no one in the world ever gets. Its only use would be the consequence of a massive bioterrorism attack. It is a monoclonal antibody directed against the anthrax organism's protective antigen, the protein that grabs onto the cell and forms a channel allowing another…
revere | July 6, 2006Several countries have elected to vaccinate poultry as a bird flu control measure. Vietnam and China both have such programs. The Vietnamese program is credited with their good record on bird flu this year. But poultry vaccination has some down sides:
The potential impact on human health of poorly implemented bird inoculations and experimental poultry vaccines needs to be carefully considered, according to a report prepared by the influenza team at the European Centre for Disease Surveillance and Control in Stockholm. A drop in the number of human cases in countries where fowl are vaccinated…
revere | July 5, 2006The irony is too delicious. Boingboing reports that Yahoo China will be sued by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industries for enabling the pirating of music by disclosing to its users where to get it on the internet. In effect they are being held responsible for the copyright status of everything they point to:
"Yahoo China has been blatantly infringing our members' rights. We have started the process and as far as we're concerned we're on the track to litigation," said John Kennedy, chairman and chief executive of the music industry trade group the International Federation…
revere | July 5, 2006Congress is helpless to immunize the American people against bird flu, but they were able to do the next best thing: immunize the vaccine makers against lawsuits. Now the respirator makers want to be next in line for the magic lawsuit vaccine.
Six companies that make respiratory masks want Congress to protect them from lawsuits, saying such a step would ensure that they could meet production demands in the event of a terrorist attack or flu pandemic.
The companies -- Aearo. Bacou-Dalloz, Inovel, Moldex, MSA and North Safety, which collectively have formed the Coalition for Breathing Safety…
revere | July 4, 2006A new fatality from H5N1 infection in Indonesia has been confirmed by the WHO reference lab in Hong Kong. So what's new? Nothing in particular except it gives me an opportunity to point out something that has been bothering me about how health officials are characterizing the risk of getting infected from this virus. First the report (via Reuters):
The victim died on 16 Jun 2006 in Tulungagung in East Java province after being admitted to hospital on 8 Jun 2006, I Nyoman Kandun, director general for communicable disease control at the health ministry, told Reuters. The infection was confirmed…
revere | July 4, 2006The prinicipal author of the American Declaration of Independence, whose 230th anniversary the US celebrates today, wrote this:
The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.
[snip]
Difference of opinion is advantageous in religion. The several sects form a Censor morum over each other. Is uniformity attainable? Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured,…
revere | July 3, 2006The suspicion that China is not as open about disease outbreaks within its borders was not helped last week when a Research Correspondence in The New England Journal of Medicine from eight Chinese scientists reporting an early case of H5N1 infection was the subject of mysterious emails to the journal's editors asking it be withdrawn (see here and here). The source of the emails has not been established and the authors say they stand by their results. The whole affair was (or should be) an embarrassment to the Chinese authorities.
The major problem in China, however, has not been the Health…
revere | July 3, 2006The FDA might need a shoulder replacement for patting itself on the back. They celebrated "A Century of Protecting and Promoting Public Health" with a ceremony at the Harvey W. Wiley federal building. Or I assume they did. I wasn't there, but they had a press release by way of a personal invitation. Losts of dignitaries, including Secretary of Health and Human Services, Michael Leavitt. Purpose?
The FDA's centennial celebration, which include conferences and special forums in cities from coast to coast, have the following aims:
Observe FDA's role -- past, present and future -- domestically…
revere | July 2, 2006Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is a major cause of blindness and the wet form is the worst version. So it should be good news that the US FDA just announced its approval for a new biological treatment for it. The drug has shown remarkable effectiveness when injected into the eye, monthly. AMD is caused by the new growth of leaky blood vessels beneath the retina. The drug halts this neovascularization and even results in improvement of vision in a substantial fraction of those treated. It not only thus stops the relentless deterioration of vision that leads to blindness but can reverse…
revere | July 2, 2006A Sermonette is a good place to reprint a confession of faith. This one is bit old (over 51 years) but (unfortunately) is still pertinent. It was uttered by Corliss Lamont, son of a Chairman of the Board of the infamous J. P. Morgan investment bank , who became a committed social activist during the Depression. In the 1950s, along with many others, he became the target of Senator Joseph McCarthy, godfather to Karl Rove and the current crop of illegitimate offspring of that vile opportunist (aka the Republican party). I grew up in the McCarthy days and recall vividly the pall it cast over…
revere | July 1, 2006Suppose a natural catastrophe like a hurricane or a pandemic were to destroy the water supply and power to 1.4 million people living in a densely populated urban environment at the height of summer heat. Suppose the sewer system were severely damaged. That fuel was fast running out so even emergency generators couldn't operate. That 300,000 of the 1.4 million lived in high rise buildings so no water could reach their households. And assume they couldn't leave the area. They were trapped there. Unfortunately it's not a hypothetical.
It's happening at this moment and it's not a natural…
revere | July 1, 2006Influenza is a seasonal disease. Some seasons are worse than others. In some locations they can be even more deadly than 1918 pandemic influenza (see post here). What characteristic, then, distinguishes a pandemic outbreak from "regular" seasonal influenza if it is not severity?
Severity is, on average, a characteristic of pandemic strain outbreaks because it involves a virus to which the general population has no or little previous immunity. There is another feature of pandemic outbreaks of importance: age distribution. Limited but fairly reliable evidence indicates that pandemic outbreaks…
revere | June 30, 2006The momentum is building to release the sequestered flu sequence data. The prestigious scientific journal Nature today published a strongly worded editorial, excerpts of which you can read Nature senior correspondent Declan Butler's blog:
Indonesia has become the hot spot of avian flu, with the virus spreading quickly in animal populations, and human cases occurring more often there than elsewhere. Yet from 51 reported human cases so far -- 39 of them fatal -- the genetic sequence of only one flu virus strain has been deposited in GenBank, the publicly accessible database for such information…
revere | June 30, 2006The question has been broached here before by our commenters: if a pandemic is a threat to our civil infrastructure, how do we know the internet will continue to function? It's fine to tell workers to telecommute, but what if the information highway the commuters travel is grid locked?
Good questions without good answers. But information technology professionals are at least thinking about it. The IT trade mag, Computer World, has a story about a simulation held recently at the world Economic Forum by management consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton. The scenario was pandemic flu arriving in…
revere | June 29, 2006In a post yesterday we talked about West Nile Virus. It causes a mosquito borne disease and most people will have mild or even asymptomatic infections. But you don't want to the be the exception for this one. So what to do?
Here's the typical response in many urban environments:
Yuba-Sutter's annual battle against mosquitoes and West Nile virus will hit the streets tonight as spraying begins in residential areas of Robbins and Meridian.
The weekly spraying will begin tonight in Olivehurst, Live Oak, Linda, Plumas Lake, Marysville, Sutter, Tierra Buena and Wheatland, said Ron McBride, manager…
revere | June 27, 2006One of the knocks on the alarms about bird flu is that it is just another in a series of false alarms like Y2K, West Nile and SARS. Not true. Pandemic influenza is indeed another in a series of alarms, but the only one that might conceivably be considered a false alarm (and this isn't even sure) is Y2K. Let's take them one at a time.
The investment in fixing the Y2K bug was substantial on the part of business and government world wide, extending over several years prior to 2000. It is difficult to say what the results might have been without that investment. In many respects it is similar to…