revere | April 9, 2009A tantalizing Reuters story yesterday called attention to the uptick in human bird flu cases in Egypt, the African country with more cases than any other (although far behind Asian countries like Indonesia). The observation prompting renewed expressions of concern are that new cases seem to be in the very young (toddlers) but adult cases have almost disappeared. So where are these toddlers picking up the virus? A possibility that is consistent with the observations is that adults are giving it to the toddlers but are themselves symptomless carriers. It's not impossible, because we know that…
revere | April 8, 2009A Reuters piece under the headline, "Biotechnology Boom Raises Security Fears: Mild Diseases Could Be Turned Into Deadly Ones, Experts Caution" we see the biotech Frankenstein/terrorist bogeyman raised once again by "experts" in the area at a scientific conference in Casablanca. The weekend conference was run by a tiny group (budget of less than $250K) with a big name, the International Council for the Life Sciences (ICLS). Their sole mission is biological biosecurity, so it is understandable that their conclusion is that this is a big problem. But is it?
On the surface the proposition is…
revere | April 7, 2009I rarely do quack posts here. For one thing, this is an area ably covered by my Sciblings, chief among them Orac at Respectful Insolence (who likes to call it "woo"; I don't like the term; whatever you term it, it's quackery). For another, I'm not much interested in it. I do religion once a week on the Freethinker Sermonette, so that pretty much uses up my bullshit quotient. However yesterday I found a story on Boingboing about drinking water being sold at a Manhattan (Columbus Circle) Whole Foods store, and since I am professionally interested in drinking water, I read on. Fortunately I am…
revere | April 6, 2009When an Ebola virus related lab accident in German occurred, special pathogens researchers girded themselves for bad news. Working with agents for which there is currently no treatment of vaccine requires high containment laboratories, often touted as being virtually fail safe. While engineering and procedural controls can be instituted to minimize accidents, the wild card is always the human element, so accidents in these laboratories happen. There has already been an Ebola related death in such circumstances, and when the German woman pricked her finger with a needle containing Ebola virus…
revere | April 5, 2009My public health colleague DemFromCT continues his public health interview series on the front page of DailyKos today, talking to Dr. Georges Benjamin, Executive Director of the American Public Health Association (APHA). Dem clearly likes Dr. Benjamin, which is not a surprise. He is a very likable person. I have been a member of APHA (on and off; I keep forgetting to renew) for over 40 years, have served on one of its top policy boards and been a member of its Governing Council. But in recent years I have had little to do with APHA, and Dem's interview today illustrates one of the reasons.…
revere | April 5, 2009So what do you do when a big organization insists on maintaining false information about you? You'd demand they remove it, right?
More than 100,000 people have recently downloaded "certificates of de-baptism" from the Internet to renounce their Christian faith.
[snip]
John Hunt, a 58-year-old from London and one of the first to try to be "de-baptised," held that he was too young to make any decision when he was christened at five months old.
The male nurse said he approached the Church of England to ask it to remove his name. "They said they had sought legal advice and that I should place an…
revere | April 4, 2009If you know your bugs you know that Blattella germanica and Periplaneta americana are cockroaches. They aren't the only cockroach species. In fact there are an estimated 4000 different kinds of cockroach, many of them living in fields, forests or jungles. Unless they are living in your hospital's Intensive Care Unit:
Ectobius vittiventris (Costa) is a field-dwelling cockroach and 1 of 4,000 species worldwide. We describe a cockroach infestation of an intensive care unit (ICU).
[snip]
The University of Geneva Hospitals are a 2,200-bed tertiary healthcare center. The 18-bed medical ICU is…
revere | April 3, 2009If you had a prowler at your house you'd call the police. You'd want them to come. But what if they sent a SWAT Team, surrounded the house and blasted it from all sides. Not good. That seems to be something like the scenario for a response to a class of virulent influenza viruses. They trip the alarm and the army descends and levels the house. The prowler is taken care of. So are you. The phenomenon has acquired the name "cytokine storm," although a better description might be immune system dysregulation. Your immune system has a lot of powerful weapons to protect you, but like a police force…
revere | April 2, 2009There has been more talk recently that our wastewater are loaded with pharmaceuticals. No surprise. People often dump out of date pills down the toilet, but much more important, they send them flushing in by excreting them. That's wastewater, though, not drinking water. They do get into drinking water, too, but at much lower levels. Now the EPA and collaborators at Baylor University have found another pathway to humans. Fish:
Fish from 5 U.S. rivers were found to be tainted with traces of medications and common chemicals, according to a new study from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency…
revere | April 1, 2009We have a small dog in our house. She came to us from Mrs. R.'s elderly mother, who had decided that a dog would be a good companion. She lived alone in the city. She also had low vision, and within weeks she had already fallen over the frisky little pup who was constantly under foot. As a public health measure, we took the pooch, although we already had a dog of our own. That was seven years ago and Rosie remains a beloved member of the family. She discovered we were easily trainable, so that part went fine (for her). Now CDC has published a report verifying that the circumstances that…
revere | March 31, 2009Tufts University is the latest institution to step in the Conflict of Interest mess and come out with shoes that smell. The University had organized a conference on conflict of interest in medicine and research, with Iowa's Republican Senator Charles Grassley as the keynoter. Grassley has been an indefatigable crusader against instances of fraud and abuse against the federal government, and is a principal author and defender of the Federal False Claims Act, which allows whistleblowers to share in the recovery of fraudulently obtained monies (for an excellent account, see Henry Scammell's…
revere | March 30, 2009A little over a week ago the Environmental Protection Agency sent the White House its finding that global warming endangers public health and welfare. This doesn't sound like news, and except for a minority of scientists out there it is very, very old news. But in the context of a 2007 Supreme Court ruling it is indeed big news:
The proposal -- which comes in response to a 2007 Supreme Court decision ordering EPA to consider whether carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases should be regulated under the Clean Air Act -- could lay the groundwork for nationwide measures to limit such emissions…
revere | March 29, 2009I have a particular interest in food poisoning. I admit there is something unhealthy about my fascination but there it is. One of the more interesting ones is ciguatera fish poisoning, and CDC has just reported an unusual cluster from North Carolina. Ciguatera fish poisoning (CFP) happens when a carnivorous fish higher in the food chain (e.g., barracuda, amberjack, red snapper, grouper) eats a smaller plant eating species that itself has dined on a large dinoflagellate called Gambierdiscus, commonly found around coral reefs in the Caribbean and in the Pacific. These little guys have a toxin…
revere | March 29, 2009If it's true that atheism is a "religion" because it has a "non-belief system," there are a helluva lot of atheists out there, since there are a lot of religions and most people believe in at most one of them. Or as one wag put it, "We are all atheists. It's just that I believe in one less god than you." That's a fairly trivial observation and not the main point of this week's Sermonette, which is about Evolution -- in particular, The Origin of Specious. But most people will have no trouble making the inference:
revere | March 28, 2009When my mother died last year at the age of 103 it ended a life that went from the Wright Brothers first flight through to the internet. That's a lot of change to accommodate, but she did it pretty well, although there were things she could not get used to. One of the things that was hardest for her to get used to was the prices of particular things, of which long distance telephone calls was an example. Long past the time when such calls had become ridiculously cheap, she was always nervous about talking "long distance." I'll grant you it's sometimes hard to adjust, always comparing things…
revere | March 27, 2009I may be one of the few people in the world of TV watchers who has never seen a single episode of CSI: Whatever, a show featuring (I am told) "scientific" forensics work. Mrs. R., however, is fond of watching another show, Bones, which features a forensic anthropologist who works with a team that routinely accomlishes astounding feats of scientific detection (example: "That bug we found on the corpse is found only in a parking lot across from a school in Arlington, Virginia. Let's go. The new kidnap victim is probably there.") They can also reconstruct faces from fragments of skull bone and…
revere | March 26, 2009The American Scientist is the magazine of the scientific society, Sigma Xi. You can get it on the news stand, and that's where I bought the latest issue (March-April, 2009). One of the articles is by historian of engineering, Henry Petroski, and it's about the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. The bridge was a product of Depression infrastructure funding but instead of being an investment in the future it only lasted four months. It is famous because its spectacular collapse was caught on film (below the jump) and for many years was shown in thousands of undergraduate calculus and elementary physics…
revere | March 25, 2009"The Stupid. It Burns!" I don't know where this Simpson-esque phrase comes from, but The Stupid burns pretty bright in the brains of Republican Governors Mark Sanford and Bobby Jindal who are refusing stimulus money for unemployment compensation even though their states have some of the highest unemployment rates in the nation. That's stupid. Like refusing help with avian influenza even if you have more cases of the disease than anywhere in the world. The Stupid isn't just an American disease.
Take Indonesian Health Minister Siti Fadillah Supari. Please.
Source: plognark
Indonesian Health…
revere | March 24, 2009When the Wall Street Journal called attention to a claim that the Journal of the American Medical Association called a whistle-blower a "nobody" and a "nothing," a claim JAMA denied, I didn't know what to think. I was inclined to give JAMA the benefit of the doubt. Whatever dealings I've had (and they are few) with JAMA's editor in chief, Dr. Catherine DeAngelis, she's been pleasant and has a reputation for being a tough and intelligent editor. It sounded as if someone had gotten a little irritated and maybe said things in a way that wasn't quite appropriate, but these things happen. But…
revere | March 23, 2009One of the nastiest things about the years after the Republicans took control of the Congress in 1994 and Bush the White House in 2001 was the increase in inequality in the US. The rich not only got richer and the poor, poorer, but rich got more comfortable and led better lives. The idea that they got rich because all they did was work is nonsense. They had plenty of time to spend their money and relax. Moreover the prosperity in the economy didn't accrue to everyone. It was the folks at the top that benefitted. We all know that the rising tide only lifted the yachts, but we sometimes forget…