revere | June 18, 2006An interesting article, The effect of temperature and UV light on infectivity of avian influenza virus (H5N1, Thai field strain) in chicken fecal manure, has appeared in Southeast Asian J Trop Med Public Health(2006 Jan;37(1):102-5). I can only read the abstract as no library around here carries this journal.
The authors took normal chicken fecal manure (pH 8.23 and 13.7% moisture) divided into three portions, each inoculated with a Thai field strain of H5N1 highly pathogenic avian influenza virus at high dose. They incubated the first portion at 25o C (that's 77 o F. for the Celsius…
revere | June 18, 2006The Ten Commandments. They are so important to our civilization, they should always be in front of us -- always. In our churches. Our homes. Our bars. Our whorehouses. Even in the Houses of Congress. If we don't know them, how can we be decent Americans?
That's why Congressman Lynn Westmoreland, Georgia Republican, has co-sponsored a bill requiring their display in the US House of Representatives and the US Senate. Like having your History of Western Civ notes on the refrigerator door so you can see them when going for a beer.
Listen (and learn!) as the CongressThing is interviewed by Stephen…
revere | June 17, 2006The journal Science has just published an important letter from veterinary pathologist Dr. Ilaria Capua of the Istituto Zooprofilattico delle Venezie and her colleagues in national veterinary laboratories in the UK, Australia and the US pledging to deposit avian influenza gene sequences into the publicly available online depository, GenBank, as soon as they are determined. This is an important breakthrough in a controversy that roiled the world of flu virologists for almost a year (see posts here, here, here and here). But there is still some way to go.
Capua was among the first scientists to…
revere | June 17, 2006Some of the really good issues ads on TV these days come from oil giant British Petroleum (BP). They feature ordinary looking people who ask tough questions about energy policy to which BP just responds with a brief statement that they are working on it and "it's a start." Very understated, earnest and quite effective. Great website, too. Compare the BP ads to the annoying and terrible oil and gas industry ads that feature actors and quick cuts, repeated key words and plaintive entreaties (eyes rolled skywards), like "just tell us the truth," followed by a URL where presumably you will find…
revere | June 17, 2006The 64 World Cup soccer (fotbol) matches started a week ago in 12 German cities and will continue until July 9. Three million soccer fans are expected from Europe and beyond. Three of the cities where matches will be played, Cologne, Dortmund and Gelsenkirchen, are in the German state of Nordrhein-Westfalen. So is a measles outbreak in children and young adults. The Ukraine is also experiencing a large measles outbreak, with case numbers exceeding 20,000 by the end of February. The Ukrainian National team qualified for the tournament and will undoubtedly have many fans there. Meanwhile…
revere | June 16, 2006We recently posted about the confusion about the diagnosis of the seven year old girl in Indonesia for whom local tests indicated H5N1 infection but where the WHO laboratory was not able to confirm it. We contrasted the news reports from AP and Bloomberg, the first of which quoted Indonesian Ministry of Health sources as alleging WHO had determined the girl didn't have the virus while the second said the tests were inconclusive, quoting WHO itself. This is a matter of bad sourcing by the AP. The Indonesian authorities are not reliable and this is a typical example.
New specimens were sent to…
revere | June 15, 2006If you want a preview of what widespead absenteeism in the health sector, overloaded health care facilities and a breakdown in social infrastructure would be like in an influenza pandemic, we've got one for you. It isn't from a biological virus, but the viruses of hatred, intolerance and sectarian violence. Palestine and Israel, where else?
Internecine warfare amongst the Palestinians is nothing new. It's like a cancer, eating the flesh of normal civil life. Nor are indiscriminate attacks on innocent Israelis new. Nothing new either about Israel's state-inflicted cruelty and collective…
revere | June 15, 2006Two articles in local Indonesian news sources are of interest. They illustrate the difficulty of trying to figure out what is happening using local news reports. Both relate to the hospitalization of a reporter for the Indonesian magazine Tempo who had covered the culling of poultry and the funeral of a bird flu victim. I have had both articles translated by a native speaker, since previous translations were via machine (see, for example, here). The machine translations are much more difficult to read but the essential elements of the reports are discernible. Since we have more idiomatic…
revere | June 15, 2006Yesterday's WaPo story that HHS Secretary Michael Leavitt is the heaviest user of CDC's Emergency jet is being played like a scandal. This is the most scandal-prone administration in recent memory, not a surprise. But I'm of two minds about it (or maybe 1.56 minds). First the details.
Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt defended his extensive use in recent months of a jet leased to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for emergency use.
Leavitt's explanation for his use of the jet occurred at a hearing Wednesday of the House Ways and Means Committee. Moments earlier,…
revere | June 15, 2006What do you do when the chickens come home to roost and they look healthy (but might not be)? Ask the folks in Hong Kong. Except they don't know either.
Update, 6/15/06: The Chinese Ministry of Health is confirming the diagnosis of H5N1 in the 31 year old truck driver from Shenzhen. He is now officially the 19th human case in China.
China (Mainland) decided to control avian influenza by a massive poultry vaccination program. That's a lot of vaccinations, since they produce 4 or 5 billion new birds a year. Billion, as in one thousand million, or more than 100 vaccinations per second every…
revere | June 14, 2006There are some remarkably evil people in this world. They come in all kinds. Some would probably seem relatively ordinary or perhaps respectable (like some of the leaders of the US government). There's the recent example of the unlamented murderer al-Zarqawi, whose passing is a net plus for the world, although the reveling was more than a bit unseemly. And then there's these guys.
Counterfeit malaria drugs are increasing in number and will continue to claim lives unless more action is taken, say researchers.
The percentage of over-the-counter artesunate tablets containing no active ingredient…
revere | June 14, 2006The US House of Representatives just did what it does best: spend money according to the most life-denying priorities one can imagine, turning human values upside down. Surprise.
The House bill (which must be reconciled with a more generous but equally egregious Senate version) vomits up $94.5 billion, more than two thirds of which is to finance two wars that have already sent over a third of a trillion dollars down the hopper. The vote was 351 - 67 with minimal debate. This bill is in addition to a $427 billion defense spending bill that has another $50 billion for the Iraq mistake.
The…
revere | June 13, 2006Time out for a bit of infectious disease terminology. The words pathogenic, virulent and transmissible get tossed around a lot when talking about the bird flu virus and the possibilities of a pandemic. They are sometimes used interchangeably. They aren't interchangeable, however, and their differences are important to understanding talk about bird flu.
Let's start with one other term, the pre-requisite for the other three, infectivity. Viruses are bits of genetic material and associated proteins that do essentially one thing and one thing only: make copies of themselves. That's it. They aren'…
revere | June 13, 2006At a meeting in Jakarta of Indonesian health and agriculture ministries, the World Health Organization, UNICEF, the Food and Agriculture Organization and the National Commission on Bird Flu, one Indonesian official announces the obvious while another tells us that what is obvious is yet to be shown. Jeez.
"Limited human-to-human transmission may have occurred in small clusters in the country. It has not only happened in several regions in Indonesia but also in Azerbaijan and other places in the world," Coordinating Minister for the People's Welfare Aburizal Bakrie said Friday after a meeting…
revere | June 12, 2006Computer programmers are associated with computer viruses, not human viruses. But at the end of April an Indian computer programmer landed in Boston incubating measles virus. He had been hired by a business investment firm whose offices were on the 18th floor of a Boston skyscraper, the John Hancock Tower. May 5 he developed fever, cough and then a rash and became the index case in what is so far an 11 person outbreak, the largest number of measles cases in the city since 1989. (Boston Globe) The outbreak is of special interest for what it says for the spread of infectious disease in the era…
revere | June 12, 2006Holy shit! Melanie of Just a Bump in the Beltway tags me with the Random Eight meme and no sooner do I get it done (incurring her wrath because I didn't pass it on), when I learn that as a ScienceBlogs newcomer we also got tagged with the pi meme by Janet (Dr. Free-Ride).
It could be a lot worse. Pi is an irrational number whose decimal expansion doesn't end or repeat and this is a truncated version (eight digits; I don't know if this is because the ScienceBlogs publishers are bandwidth cheapskates; or the mistaken notion you cannot represent an irrational number exactly on a computer. That…
revere | June 11, 2006A blog meme has just landed on my head, like a deposit from a flu infected migratory bird (affirmative answer to the question, "Do you have any grey poop on?"). It got dumped on me by my Flu Wiki partner, Melanie Mattson, maestra of the acclaimed Just a Bump in the Beltway blog. I tagged her about two months ago and this is payback. If you don't know, a blog meme is a task set by one blogger on one or more others, to proceed chain fashion until everyone is exhausted or bored or both.
This one should have been easy: set down eight random things about yourself. But it's a bit harder if there…
revere | June 11, 2006It's June, the month of weddings, and as it turns out the 34th anniversary of our own wedding. Mrs. R. and I are off at still another wedding this weekend, but I ran into some romantic vows to share with everyone. It seems two hackers decided to establish a symbolic link and coded their wedding vows so each word had exactly the number of letters of the decimal expansion of a personally chosen mathematical constant. Mako (the groom) chose the complexly tailored constant, phi. phi is also known as the Golden Ratio and is found in logarithmic spirals and numerous other constructions. The bride…
revere | June 11, 2006No surprise that the American public is more concerned about how to pay for higher education than they are about the ideology of its purveyors. If I had to pay for it today (and were still paying my kids' freight), that would be my number one concern, too. I'd still worry about what they were learning, too, and from whom. My highschool education in the 1950s was a daily diet of rightwing ideology we all thought was "normal." College at the turn of the sixties wasn't much better, and I went to a university with a notorious lefty reputation (I'm proud to say). It's no surprise that the public…
revere | June 10, 2006One of the most valuable things WHO has to offer in an influenza pandemic is information. Unfortunately, this hasn't been their strong suit. They have been relatively slow in disseminating epidemiological information, mainly because they have not been able to get good cooperation from the member states. Even when they can release the information, however, unaccountably they don't. Their risk communication skills are, shall we say, vestigial. The sequence release issue has become a crisis of confidence in WHO veracity. Yes, they have problems with member states (see here, here, here, here and…