revere | November 6, 2008Three years ago we discussed (we were still on blogspot then) a spreading outbreak of a mysterious disease in Sichuan (Szechuan), China. Any mysterious disease outbreak in China always raises warning flags since southern China is the incubator for influenza. The Chinese discounted the possibility of bird flu, saying it was instead a massive outbreak caused by the bacterium Streptococcus suis, Type 2, an important cause of disease in pigs. S. suis sometimes causes human menigitis or septic shock, but the final total of 215 cases and 38 deaths seemed atypical. But it turned out Chinese…
revere | November 5, 2008The US election is over. Now comes the battle over what it means. The right wing of the Democratic Party aside, it seems pretty clear this was one of the periodic "realignment" elections that are of historic significance. Obama's base, overwhelmingly the progressive heart of the Democratic Party, is a powerful coalition of the younger generation, racial and ethnic "minorities" (each probably constituting larger voting blocks than the right wing linchpin of white evangelicals), GLBT groups, women, young professionals, those deeply concerned about the environment, traditional Democratic…
revere | November 5, 2008Some good news out of the West African country of Gambia: a stunning reduction in malaria in the last five years as a result of some fairly simple techniques:
Incidence of malaria in Gambia has plunged thanks to an array of low-cost strategies, offering the tempting vision of eliminating this disease in parts of Africa, a study published Friday by The Lancet said.
At four key monitoring sites in the small West African state, the number of malarial cases fell by between 50 percent and 82 percent between 2003 and 2007, its authors found.
The tally of deaths from malaria, recorded at two…
revere | November 4, 2008Mrs. R. and I are getting ready for a "game day" dinner (Sloppy Joes and a white bean dip, beer/wine, left over Halloween candy) in front of the TV to watch returns. We'll probably flip around but mainly stay at MSNBC to hear Rachel Maddow's take. As much as I detest Chris Matthews's uninformed superficiality, his palpable pleasure and delight at American politics is fun to watch.
The whole world is watching this election. But in our house it will just be the two of us humans plus Rosie the dog. Which is fine by me.
If you are keeping track via the internet outside the US, here's a place to…
revere | November 4, 2008Election Day, November, 1884
by Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
If I should need to name, O Western World, your powerfulest scene and
show,
'Twould not be you, Niagara--nor you, ye limitless prairies--nor
your huge rifts of canyons, Colorado,
Nor you, Yosemite--nor Yellowstone, with all its spasmic
geyser-loops ascending to the skies, appearing and disappearing,
Nor Oregon's white cones--nor Huron's belt of mighty lakes--nor
Mississippi's stream:
--This seething hemisphere's humanity, as now, I'd name--the still
small voice vibrating--America's choosing day,
(The heart of it not in the chosen--the…
revere | November 4, 2008The tort system is the favorite whipping boy of the anti-regulation crowd. That's because once you remove regulation, something the Bush administration has championed and done effectively, the only recourse someone injured by the fraud or negligence of a product or drug manufacturer is through a lawsuit for damages. Since the anti-regulation crowd serves Big Pharma and their cronies, this is the perfect solution: no constraints. The propaganda machine, aided an abetter by a compliant congress and a business dominated media, has been extremely successful in promoting the idea that tort suits…
revere | November 3, 2008Proposition 8, a ballot initiative in California, would make marriage an institution confined to one man and one woman (as opposed to what? many men and one woman or one man and many women? Someone should tell the Mormon Church, the chief bankrollers of this vile initiative, about that!). It is appropriately called Proposition Hate. Polling indicates it is very close in California and this legislative bigotry may well pass, which would be a terrible tragedy. But let's face it. This war is over, even if some skirmishes are left to fight and we may lose some of them. The current younger…
revere | November 3, 2008There are only 77 days left in the Bush administration. Hallelujah. Finally an end to the carnage, right? Not so fast! Unless you think it's not doing any damage to: remove animals from the endangered species list without adequate public participation, putting power plants near national parks, making it easier to blow the tops of mountains off so coal operators can get to dirty coal or loosening regulations on disposal of factory farm wastes. If that's your idea of good environmental stewardship and "no more carnage," you'll be delighted to hear that the Bushies are making haste to ramrod…
revere | November 2, 2008Tuesday, November 4, marks the end of a long Presidential election season in the United States. I will be voting for Barack Obama. I will also be voting against John McCain. There are many reasons, but Josh Marshall pinpoints one of the main ones:
McCainism
For my own part, obviously, I hope Barack Obama can pull off a victory on Tuesday. But more than that, I hope the result of the election can be a rebuke, a closing of the book on McCainism and the moral filth it has come to represent. I'm under no illusion that negative or even nasty campaigning will come to an end in the USA. I don't…
revere | November 2, 2008The headline over at The Raw Story (a liberal news site) is: "GOP senator lobs false atheism smears in desperate attempt to hold seat." So Liddy Dole, the absentee Senator from North Carolina, thinks that the way to save her seat is to "smear" her opponent as "godless."
Her opponent, Kay Hagan, will have none of it. "I believe in God," says Sunday School Teacher Hagan:
OK. I get it. In North Carolina you better believe in God or you can't be elected. Probably not just North Carolina, either. Almost anywhere in these United States. Those are the Rules. Time for some New Rules:
revere | November 1, 2008No one who knows me would ever consider me a domestic terrorist. I am, in fact, a pacifist. You may think that's naive, but it would be a real stretch to consider my pacifism to be the same as terrorism, even if you think it helps terrorism (in which case I strenuously disagree). I'm a doctor and take the responsibility to heal pretty seriously. Barack Obama is being accused of "palling around with terrorists" because he has had an association with people the McCain campaign decided they want to call domestic terrorists purely for the purpose of inferring guilt -- guilt, literally, by…
revere | November 1, 2008Blogging can vary in spontaneity. Some bloggers spend a lot of effort honing individual posts, while some do a lot of "one offs" in response to rapidly changing events. A limiting form of the latter is "live blogging," essentially reporting in real time during a meeting, demonstration or particular event. In this sense blogging isn't very different than print journalism. There are stories that are quickies, just reporting some facts or acting as a stenographer for the government, a political campaign or commercial press release. Then there are the more in-depth analytical and investigative…
revere | October 31, 2008While Barack Obama continues to draw huge crowds (tens of thousands, sometimes over 100,000), John McCain's are more modest. Yesterday he had an estimated 6000 in Ohio. Never mind that 4,000 were bused in from local school districts, including the aptly named 2500 Defiance School District. I'm sure they were most interested.
One person who apparently was too busy to make it, though, was Joe the Plumber. I guess he forgot to RSVP:
hat tip Robert Arena, AmericaBlog and DailyKos
This might be hopeful economic news, however. The first sign of a recession is when you can get your plumber to come…
revere | October 31, 2008The last time we looked at the high containment laboratory in Galveston, Texas, it was directly in the path of Hurricane Ike. Flooding from Ike devastated Galveston but it was a comparatively weak storm, Category 2 on the Sumner Simpson scale. Katrina was a Cat 4. The worst storms are the huge Category 5 affairs. So Galveston got off pretty well as far as storm intensity goes, although the water damage was catastrophic. To remind you, our post on that previous occasion was, "Why would any sane person put a Level 4 biodefense lab in Galveston?" It turns out that now that the storm has passed,…
revere | October 30, 2008As I write this the Obama-Biden ticket has been endorsed by 231 newspapers across the country, the McCain-Palin ticket by only 102 (see here for latest tally). The final Kerry-Bush score was 213 - 205. Most of us don't really care that much about the newspaper endorsement bragging rights and I doubt it makes much difference to voters, either. No one expects the Wall Street Journal to endorse Obama (although the Financial Times did). After all, the WSJ knows that Republicans are much more reliably corporation friendly than Democrats. Along the same lines, I am extremely pleased to announce…
revere | October 30, 2008We've been keeping an eye out for the FDA's expert task force review of their own draft report on bisphenol-A (BPA; for more posts see here, here, here, here, here for other BPA posts). We previously reported to you the concern that the (outside) chair of that expert panel had a risk assessment institute at the University of Michigan that was the recipient of a large gift from one of the most vociferous proponents of BPA's safety and an ardent anti-regulatory ideologue. Whether it was a result of "working the refs" or a straightforward judgment, the panel has returned its report, concurring…
revere | October 29, 2008There is a lot of misery in this world, too much of it the result of what we humans do to each other. And it's getting worse. A typical example, is a country where 28% of the children are malnourished, up from 19% five years ago; where in 2006 11% of the newborns were underweight, up from 4% three years before; where 15% of the population doesn't have and can't afford enough food and is dependent food assistance programs for survival; where 70% don't have adequate water and 80% don't have adequate sanitation so that in the poorest urban neighborhoods people drink a water and sewage mixture;…
revere | October 29, 2008The Obama campaign has made much of the McCain campaign's "erratic" performance but there are some things he has been steady and consistent about. Like reproductive rights. He's against them. Steadily. Consistently. You surely know McCain wants to make abortion illegal again in the US. But he's not content to stop there:
McCain opposed spending $100 million to prevent unintended and teen pregnancies.
In 2005, McCain voted NO to allocate $100 million to expand access to preventive health care services that reduce the numbers of unintended and teen pregnancies and reduce the number of…
revere | October 28, 2008Governor Palin's "fruitfly moment" was a display of her utter contempt and disregard for modern science, perhaps even more emblematic than her belief that dinosaurs and humans coexisted. But John McCain has his own moments where we can see his true self:
"It has to be safe, environment, blah, blah, blah"? Translation: "I don't really care about whether nuclear power is safe for people and the environment. It's drill, drill, drill those nuclei."
How does he know it's safe?
McCain suggested nuclear power is a safe energy resource because "we've been sailing Navy ships around the world for 50…
revere | October 28, 2008Most people know that a good place to pick up an antibiotic resistant infection is in a hospital. Lots of pathogenic bugs there living (often) happily in a sea of antimicrobial agents. Better to stay away from hospitals, somewhere nice. But apparently, not at the beach:
A drug-resistant germ linked to surgical wound and urinary tract infections was found on five U.S. West Coast beaches, according to scientists who said the bacteria isn't usually seen outside of hospitals.
Samples of sand and water were taken from seven public beaches and a fishing pier in the state of Washington and southern…