revere | January 18, 2009What with college bowl games, NFL play-offs, the Superbowl and the NCAA basketball tournament around the corner, God is pretty busy these days, helping teams win and athletes look gook. Maybe this accounts for His lack of attention to poverty, war, cruelty, hatred and every conceivable kind of tribalism. Of course athletic competition is pretty important and folks in Kansas take it pretty seriously. They also take religion pretty seriously, or so I'm told. So when columnist Bill Mayer at KUsports.com observed that athletes who thank the deity for scoring a touchdown in football or a three…
revere | January 17, 2009Prions, the infectious proteins that are the likely agents of Kuru, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease ("Mad Cow Disease"), scrapie in sheep and Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) of elk and deer, are the zombie undead of pathogens. Almost nothing we do inactivates them. They withstand fire, autoclaving, radiation and all manner of chemical disinfectants. Except for the mineral birnessite:
That the birnessite family of minerals possessed the capacity to degrade prions was a surprise, [Joel Pedersen, a University of Wisconsin-Madison environmental chemist] says. Manganese oxides like birnessite are…
revere | January 16, 2009I'm on the road today. I'm a member of an external advisory committee for a research program at a university about an hour by car from my own. Not bad duty. You get to listen to scientists talking about science all day (some of us actually like that) and you get asked your opinions (whether well founded or not). But it's winter, there's a storm brewing and the rush hour traffic on the interstate at 7 in the morning is very heavy, cruising along at 60 miles an hour. I'm driving my 14 year old shitbox Volvo sedan with the hood that looks like it will pop up as I drive (it won't; in fact I'm…
revere | January 15, 2009New Scientist reporter Mark Buchanan has a fascinating article this week on "the curse of work." The title might be the least satisfactory thing about this examination of a new mathematical article that attempts to explain the inexplicable:
"Parkinson's law", first published in an article of 1955, states: work expands to fill the time available for its completion. Is it more than just a cynical slogan? (Image: OJO Images/Rex Features)
It is 1944, and there is a war on. In a joint army and air force headquarters somewhere in England, Major Parkinson must oil the administrative wheels of the…
revere | January 14, 2009Last week we alerted you to a gross miscarriage of justice involving two doctors in Iran. Many of you responded by calling the Mission of Iran at the UN and signing a petition. I wish I could report good news in this update, but so far what we have heard is not encouraging. From an email from Physicians for Human Rights USA:
I wanted to send you an urgent update on the case of Drs Kamiar and Arash Alaei. We still do not have a verdict in the case, but have released a press statement this evening in response to reports out of Iran today that are very troubling. A spokesperson for the Iranian…
revere | January 14, 2009One of the triumphs of 19th and 20th century public health was the provision of piped water into cities and towns. With the use of modern methods of disinfection (primarily chlorination) water as a source of mass distributed poisons rapidly receded, and with it the preponderance of infectious diseases that were the scourge of urban life. Urban water supplied were an efficient means to provide a healthy required substance, water, to the whole population and once. But of course it is also an efficient means to distribute unhealthy stuff -- not just microbes but chemicals. I've worked on the…
revere | January 13, 2009I know I shouldn't, but I just have to ask. What's with the bath tubs on the Cialis ads? (in case you live in a bubble, Cialis is for "erectile dysfunction," what we used to call impotence).
The original Cialis ads were faux tasteful things (at least compared to the really toe curling "Viva Viagra" ads) that always ended up with the couple holding hands in a natural setting. The impression you got was that when you take Cialis the time is usually right when you are outdoors. Inconvenient. Then at some point it morphed into the couple each in their own bath tubs, as in the pic from their…
revere | January 13, 2009Whenever you read about some high profile drug company trial where the smoking gun is some incriminating email, do you shake your head and wonder, "How could they have written that in an email?" There are two ways for a drug company to protect itself from being nailed by these kinds of emails. The best is not to do things that if written anywhere would incriminate them. The other way is to teach your employees not to leave documentary evidence of your company's misdeeds. Guess which route the drug companies are taking?
Want to avoid those embarrassing internal emails containing concerns that…
revere | January 12, 2009Some people complain the news about the Gaza massacre is one sided or incomplete. And it is both. This is one reason it appears one sided. Because it is. And it's incomplete. In the US we don't see this (h/t The Brain Police):
revere | January 12, 2009DemFromCt's excellent post at DailyKos alerted us to the fact that this year's vaccine appears to have a mismatched influenza B component. Each year vaccine makers try to anticipate the strains that will be circulating 6 months hence, based on surveillance data. They have been fairly good with their guesses but things seem to be getting more complicated in recent years and mismatched strains are becoming more common, that is, the vaccines don't protect as well or at all against the strains that are actually circulating. There are three strains in the yearly "flu shot," two influenza A strains…
revere | January 11, 2009We've been blogging about flu for over four years. It's not a rare topic these days. But when we started we only found two other bloggers with an interest in the subject. One was the late (and much missed) Melanie Mattson at Just a Bump in the Beltway blog. The other was DailyKos frontpager DemFromCT. Dem is still on the front page at dKos and still on top of flu. He is one of the blogosphere's pre-eminent flu experts, being not only an accomplished blogger but a medical professional whose specialty is pulmonology. He sees flu up close, in the lungs of his patients. So whenever Dem writes…
revere | January 11, 2009We are getting the first hints of a potential foodborne vehicle for the multi-state salmonella outbreak that began in September. We've seen it before:
The source of the outbreak of Salmonella [t]yphimurium that has sickened at least 400 and may have contributed to one death has been identified in Minnesota as King Nut peanut butter. Peanut butter tainted with the genetic fingerprint matching the outbreak was tested by the Minnesota Health Department. The product is suspected as the source of the nation-wide illnesses, which began showing up in September 2008 and have been documented in 42…
revere | January 11, 2009Atheism is making the rounds in the United Kingdom. Street by street. Bus stop to bus stop. A message of godlessness is being emblazoned on the sides of some 800 buses:
Really not offensive, unless anything questioning God's existence is offensive. Apparently to a great many people it isn't. The atheist bus campaign was fueled by public pledges in response to another bus campaign, the Jesus Said ads on London buses last June:
These ads displayed the URL of a website which stated that non-Christians "will be condemned to everlasting separation from God and then you spend all eternity in…
revere | January 11, 2009A genuine fear among many in the public health community was that Obama would not replace Dr. Julie Gerberding as Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (aka, the CDC). I am relieved to report that she will be out in 9 days, although she isn't going willingly and will wring every last second of power and salary out of it: literally. Her requested resignation is effective at noon on January 20 just as Obama becomes the 44th President of the United States:
CDC Director Julie Gerberding's controversial tenure will end Jan. 20 -- after Barack Obama is sworn in as president,…
revere | January 9, 2009The whole Scienceblogs.com site (all 60 plus blogs) will be performing an upgrade to Moveable Type 4 starting today at about 1 pm (Eastern Standard Time, US, Friday, Jan. 9). The site will remain up but there will be no posting and no commenting until the upgrade is complete, we hope by late Saturday sometime. I don't think you will see much difference on your end but there will be improved speed and new editing tools for us and, we are promised, future improvements in commenting and other features, for you.
Meanwhile, there are lots of great science blogs out there, so take the time to…
revere | January 9, 2009You may be surprised to learn (I was) that the US is having a large (almost 400 people) multistate (42) salmonella outbreak (S. typhimurium, often but not always associated with poultry and dairy products). So far 67 hospitalizations, with patients spanning the age spectrum (ages 1 to 103).DNA fingerprinting has established all cases are related (a common source or sources). Oh, and one more thing. It didn't just begin. Apparently it's been going on since sometime in September.
Like the plat du jour, this is the salmonella outbreak du jour. Last summer we were treated to the tomatoes-cilantro…
revere | January 8, 2009Mrs. R. and I tend to favor organic produce, just on general principles. It's a bit more expensive but compared to eating out it's nothing and we aren't such volume consumers that we can't make it up by my buying one less book a month. And while Obama's many of Obama's cabinet picks have gotten good marks, some haven't. One of the most important for consumers (and for public health) is the Secretary of Agriculture, and his nominee, Iowa's tom Vilsack, is a lousy choice. Honest advocates of sustainable agriculture are particularly dismayed, although you might not know it by looking at some…
revere | January 7, 2009Many of you were readers here when science bloggers and scienceblogs in particular played a pivotal role in the case of the Tripoli 6, medics under sentence of death in Libya over trumped up charges of infecting children with HIV. Another urgent matter now confronts the worldwide scientific community involving two Iranian doctors. Declan Butler, Nature senior correspondent, has described the situation in a post at one of the Nature blogs:
Iran puts leading HIV scientists on trial
Posted on behalf of Declan Butler
Iran has summarily tried two of the nation's HIV researchers with communicating…
revere | January 7, 2009For some years I have been playfully asking students and colleagues (all active health professionals or professionals to be) if they could tell me the name of the Surgeon General of the United States. Few could. In fact, last night the current Acting Surgeon General's name was mentioned and I had not only forgotten who it was, but I actually know the guy (Steve Galson). If you ask public health professionals to name any SG, however, they all can. Most often it's C. Everett Koop but might also be David Satcher, Joycelyn Elders or (for some of us older folk) the late Julius Richmond (Julie used…
revere | January 6, 2009I will admit to a prejudice that may disqualify me from civilized company. I don't like the game of golf. When I was a youngster the first paying job I had (if I don't count delivering newspapers) was as a golf caddy at a ritzy country club (the kind that didn't admit people like me as members, even if we could afford it. However people were generally nice to me, so I can't complain.). No one had golf carts in those days (early 1950s) so the caddy carried the bags, often leather, usually with 16 clubs in each, and sometimes two bags at a time (one on each shoulder). Maybe it doesn't sound so…