revere | September 8, 2009As we expected, yesterday's vaccine piece provoked a lot of discussion, almost all of it thoughtful and pertinent. Since we've already said we might be wrong, we thought we'd take some time to respond, using it as a way to keep thinking things through on our end. Writing is thinking and thinking is needed in this situation.
Over at FluTrackers.com (an excellent flu forum like Flu Wiki with highly informed people) there were a number of lengthy responses, most of them on the negative side. Since these folks follow events closely their opinions are also worth following closely. In addressing…
revere | September 7, 2009Today is a federal holiday in the United States, the one we call "Labor Day." In most countries the labor movement celebrates on May 1 (May Day), but the origin of the US holiday ironically was in Canada where the fight for the nine-hour working day in the 1870s was celebrated at the end of summer. American labor leader Peter J. McGuire saw one of these celebrations and organized the first one in New York in 1882. After US soldiers and marshals put down a peaceful strike at the Pullman plant in bloody fashion in 1894, a fear of escalating labor unrest (the depression of 1893 was in full swing…
revere | September 7, 2009When it comes to US swine flu vaccine policy, I'm not calling the shots, but if I were I'd do it differently than the current plan, which calls for a vaccine containing only viral antigen and no immunity boosting adjuvant. I opt for a vaccine with an adjuvant, probably the one that has been used for years in Europe, MF59. If I were to make a decision like that, I could well be making a mistake, because no one really can know at this point what is going to happen or not happen. We can only go on the best data we have coupled with some principles of what's right. On that basis and using my own…
revere | September 6, 2009If the UK invaded and occupied Massachusetts because the IRA raised money and housed some of its members in South Boston I think most people would say that was not just a mistake but wrong. Assuming for the moment that the GOP was in charge and had no interest in defending the state, I can predict with some confidence that Massachusetts's citizens would fight back (as they did once before) and make it very costly for the British to stay. Logistically how could the British leave without losing face and suffering a crushing geopolitical defeat? The answer is simple: use boats (and now) planes.…
revere | September 6, 2009Bill Donohue is a demented, mean (evil?) and bat shit crazy head of a nasty coven called the Catholic League. Donohue's organization claims to represent 350,000 Catholics (yeah, right; and we're the Andrews Sisters), but since there are an estimated 67 million Catholics in the US and Canada, even by his own inflated estimate this is only 0.5%. You wouldn't think there would be much we would agree on. But I just found one. We atheists -- and it turns out, lots of Christians -- are out to get him and his mob of crazies:
Catholic League President Bill Donohue presented a paranoid side of his…
revere | September 5, 2009We've said both nice things and not so nice things about Finance Committee ranking Republican on health care, Chuck Grassley (R-IA), most recently not-so-nice things. Things like calling him morally corrupt, a liar and a gold-plated hypocrite. Things like that. We know he hears us because his office complained to a colleague about it. Now, through several sources, we've gotten an email with this subject line sent around by someone in his office and containing a news article explaining why he's not as corrupt as he looks:
Questions: why do journalists and arm chair pontificators always look…
revere | September 4, 2009A meeting of critical care specialists who have treated severely ill swine flu patients this week in Winnipeg, Canada is producing dramatic reports of illness with a virus more like H5N1 (avian or bird flu) than seasonal flu. Since H5N1 is dramatically more virulent than any seasonal flu we know of, including the 1918 H1N1 variant, this sounds alarming. Before we hit the panic button (and we should never hit the panic button, anyway), let's consider the larger context.
Everyone agrees that swine flu H1N1 is not seasonal flu. Its epidemiology is quite different and there is very little natural…
revere | September 3, 2009When I tell people I am an epidemiologist, most of them think it means I'm a skin doctor. I'm not (although the skin disease specialty is much more lucrative). Instead I study patterns of disease in populations and use what I see to try to figure out why the observed pattern rather than another. Since I'm a cancer epidemiologist I usually do large, highly systematic studies that often take years to execute and analyze, but some epidemiologists do much more immediate "shoe leather" epidemiology, investigating disease outbreaks. They are like disease detectives and we can often learn a…
revere | September 2, 2009Yesterday one of the questions we asked was whether swine H1N1 would replace seasonal viruses this season. In previous pandemics one subtype completely replaced its seasonal predecessor: in 1957 H2N2 replaced the H1N1 that had been coming back annually at least since 1918; only 11 years later, in 1968, a pandemic with H3N2 replaced the H2N2. H2N2 is no longer circulating but in 1977 an H1N1 returned and has been co-circulating with H3N2 since then. This was a new situation. We could ask why this hadn't happened before with H2N2 and H1N1 or H2N2 and H3N2 or all three together; or we could ask…
revere | September 1, 2009It's not Labor Day yet, but I guess the Reveres have to consider their vacation over. We're all back at our respective home stations. We admit that not watching flu evolve daily was a relief, although we did sneak peeks when we weren't supposed to. But it also proved to be like the stock market. The daily ups and downs sometimes obscure the bigger picture. So what does it look like now?
We have two contradictory impressions. One is that the pandemic has continued to develop in a very robust fashion. So it's a dynamic picture of change. The second is that it looks like a normal pandemic, just…
revere | August 31, 2009Well, we're back at the old homestead but today it took us 12 grueling hours in the car. We had hoped to get back earlier (it's almost midnight now) and have the time and energy to djinn up a new post, but it isn't to be. But it's hurricane season again and Danny Boy just sailed north parallel to the Atlantic coast. No doubt he will be followed by a number of others. Maybe one will get another shot at the high containment lab in Galveston. From a year ago:
Just before: Why would any sane person put a Level 4 biodefense lab in Galveston?;
. . . and a month later, after Galveston took the…
revere | August 30, 2009We're still on the road, but if all goes well we'll be pulling up to the old homestead later today. So this will be among the last of the links to previous posts and we'll be back in harness shortly, again masquerading as whoever we are masquerading as. You decide. But a propos of that thought, a little more than three years ago I wrote the post linked below, more as an idle reflection on a part of academic life that isn't discussed very often than anything else. It surprised me that since then rarely a week passes that I don't see on my referral log that someone has looked at it, usually via…
revere | August 30, 2009I only met Ted Kennedy once, many years ago. I was working with parents whose children had been stricken with leukemia in Woburn, Massachusetts. We were trying to answer the simplest of questions: why their children? These were wonderful and extraordinary people, supported by their local minister, himself an ordinary extraordinary man. They were a handful of ordinary citizens, not a huge voting bloc and they were extremely respectful but determined. Their inquiries were turning up facts that were inconvenient for some of the state's most powerful economic interests. But Ted Kennedy asked them…
revere | August 29, 2009The car is almost packed and this is the last post before I unplug from the net and we are actually on the road. But by tonight I'll probably be connected again because the cheapie motels we stay in usually have free WiFi, unlike the expensive ones that charge you $15 a day for the privilege of always being reachable from work and thus having no time to yourself. Not that we won't be reachable while on the road, because we will have our cell phones. Don't worry. We never use them while we drive. It's a matter of principle (the principle being not endangering ourselves and others).…
revere | August 28, 2009We're starting to pack the car for the trek homeward. It's a thousand mile drive so we aren't going to do it in a day. But in my youth I once drove alone for 17 straight hours in a VW beetle that had no radio, stopping only to gas up and use the bathroom. Which brings me to this post from earlier this year (February), not about washing your hands after using a public bathroom ( hope you do), but about the vexing problem of drying them once you've washed them:
Link to: "Hot air and paper towels in the public bathroom"
revere | August 27, 2009We're still at the beach (you're probably tired of hearing that, but Mrs. R. is already wringing her hands and gnashing her teeth at the thought that next week we won't be able to say it), and it's really hot here. Nineties and humid. Two years ago (August 2007) we were also here and it was also hot. Nineties and humid. It's always hot and humid at the beach. That's why they call it the beach! (huh? I thought it was because that's the place where some bozo plays his music too loud and you get sand in your picnic sandwiches). Whatever. It's hot. Last time it prompted this little post on why it…
revere | August 26, 2009Here's some scientific background to the climate change discussion (we refuse to call it a controversy). Basic science literacy, explaining what a greenhouse gas is:
"Primer on greenhouse gases":
Part I
Part II
.
Nothing controversial. Just basic science literacy.
revere | August 25, 2009Over the years we've written quite a bit (well over 3000 posts) here and on the old site at blogger.com. Some of them have been ephemeral comments, some of them whimsical and but many of them dealing with serious topics that couldn't be accommodated in the format of a single blog post. The ones explaining new results in influenza science sometimes take three or four installments. We've done a 17 part series giving a paragraph by paragraph, equation by equation explanation of a paper on mathematical modeling antiviral use in influenza for non technical readers, and another 17 parter on the…
revere | August 24, 2009While we fritter away our last week at the beach, here's another installment of past posts on flu science. There are three subjects, but one of them took three installments to relate. That's because these involve cutting edge science papers in influenza science and we wanted to take enough time to explain them in ways that were understandable to non scientists. It's likely we weren't completely successful in every case, but even if you don't understand every detail, you can get a flavor for the struggle taking place in laboratories all over the world to understand this virus:
"The complexity…
revere | August 23, 2009A full year before the housing market had a melt down (Sept. 2008), the mosquitoes knew:
"Adjustable rate mortgages and West Nile Virus infection"