revere | October 27, 2008A number of people, including here at Science Blogs, have noted, with the contempt it deserves, Governor Palin's comments about fruit flies the other day. In case you haven't seen it (where have you been?), here it is again:
I'll make this a lot shorter just by incorporating by reference and associating myself with remarks made by PZ and BarbinMD at DailyKos, as well as the meta comments by tristero at digby's place and Steve Novella at Neurologica. But I want to add my own little post script.
Governor Palin either knows or doesn't know that fruit flies are one of the major animal models in…
revere | October 27, 2008Earaches, respiratory infections and diarrhea are the bane of existence for young parents. All are potentially the result of contagious agents. The most common agent for diarrhea in infants and children is rotavirus, a double-stranded DNA virus, that CDC estimates causes 400,000 doctor visits, 200,000 emergency room visits and 55.000 to 70,000 hospitalizations each year in the under 5 year old age group. Infection produces significant immunity, and while there are seven different serotypes (A through G), 90% of infections are serotype A. In addition to diarrhea, rotavirus infections cause…
revere | October 26, 2008Superbowl commercials are a thing unto themselves. Some people watch just for the commercials. The famous Apple "1984" ad only ran once, during the 1984 Superbowl, although it has been seen online hundreds of thousands of times since. Another famous ad was the 1999 Budweiser "Whassup" ad. If you've never seen it, here it is:
John McCain's wealth is from his wife's family's Budweiser Distributership. Which brings us to the election-appropriate hilarious sequel, Whassup 2008:
revere | October 26, 2008The world has had its fill of religion-inspired terrorists. But exactly who is a "terrorist"? In my book, a terrorist is someone who knowingly kills, maims or creates terror in innocent people for a political purpose. The political purpose might be to change a government (from secular to theocratic, from one economic system to another, from colonial rule to nation state, etc.) or change a policy (stop a war, stop abortion) or to take revenge. Most people only want to employ the term to those who kill, maim or create terror for reasons they disapprove of. I'm not in that camp. If you knowingly…
revere | October 25, 2008John McCain chose Governor Palin as a nod to the Republican base and they love her. But it's not just the base. Her neighbors also love her:
revere | October 25, 2008A study just published in the British Medical Journal (full disclosure: I haven't read it, only seen wire service reports of it, but I have absolute confidence it is true -- or, more accurately, I'd say it accords 100% with my prior beliefs so I'd have no reason to question it), says that US doctors routinely prescribe drugs purely for their placebo effect, believing they have no other substantive efficacy:
Almost half of the rheumatologists and internists surveyed said they prescribed pills whose benefits derive from ``positive patient expectations'' two to three times a month, Jon Tilburt…
revere | October 24, 2008OK, so Governor Palin spent $150,000 in two months on clothes and accessories. Big deal. It wasn't illegal. And it wasn't taxpayer money. It was campaign money. Money donated to the Republican Party by people who trusted Republican officials to be good stewards of their (possibly) honestly earned dollars. Yes, there are people who are grossed out by the profligacy. My own Mrs. R., upon viewing slide #5 in this slideshow of Palin wardrobe and shoes was aghast at the Louis Vuiton bag being weilded by 7 year old Piper. But there will always be curmudgeons. Or this guy:
Mr. McCAIN. Madam…
revere | October 24, 2008Everyone knows newspapers are struggling, which means cutting back on everything, including investigative reporting. So it is nice to acknowledge that there is still some wonderful reporting going on. A particular standout has been Susanne Rust, Meg Kissinger and their colleagues at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, whose investigation of FDA's handling of the bispheonal A (BPA) episode has been superlative. Yesterday they hit paydirt again. The FDA is currently considering an August draft report of a task force convened last April to re-examine the safety of BPA. The draft report says BPA is…
revere | October 23, 2008If an al-Qaeda website had endorsed Barack Obama I think we know what the McCain campaign would do with it. It would be absolutely ridiculous, but we know they'd be trumpeting it from small town to small town in "the real America." Now that the shoe is on the other foot, with an al-Qaeda website saying a McCain presidency would be just the ticket for them, it will be interesting to see how they spin it. It is quite obvious that McCain is not an al-Qaeda sympathizer, no matter what he might feel free to say about his opponent. Dishonorable and incompetent, perhaps. Which gets us closer to the…
revere | October 23, 2008With the advent of flu season the perennial question of the "next pandemic" is again making an appearance, although I think it is more of a cameo appearance than a substantive one. WHO, CDC and numerous state health departments are warning citizens about seasonal flu, still a major public health problem, and the continuing threat of emergence of a novel flu virus to which the earth's population has little or no immunity. There is something both plaintive and formulaic about these warnings. Seasonal flu is with us every flu season (hence its name) and the feared pandemic of bird flu has yet to…
revere | October 22, 2008I confess that I am a political news junkie. In the 2004 election my main source of information were blogs (DailyKos, MyDD and Eschaton were my mainstays, with lots of others being hit on a regular basis). I still read them (I've added OpenLeft, AmericaBlog and ThinkProgress to the must read list, hitting lots of others almost as often), but unlike 2004 Mrs.R. and I also watch cable news, usually MSNBC's 7 pm to 10 pm line-up. It's mainly entertainment value. We don't learn much we didn't already know. It's sort of like the old days when the family gathered around the TV set each night,…
revere | October 22, 2008The interconnected web of health and the environment never ceases to amaze me. A good example is a new report from India's Sundarban islands suggesting that climate change, among other things, is contributing to an increase in tiger attacks:
Wildlife experts say endangered tigers in the world's largest reserve are turning on humans because rising sea levels and coastal erosion are steadily shrinking the tigers' natural habitat.
The Sundarbans, a 26,000 sq km area of low-lying swamps on India's border with Bangladesh, is dotted with hundreds of small islands criss-crossed by water channels.
"…
revere | October 21, 2008Dishonest John McCain may be a distinguished veteran, but he isn't the favorite of veteran's groups. Not that you'd know it to listen to him. He has consistently lied about this, blatantly and brazenly. Like when he responded to a veteran's question about why his voting record on funding the VA is so abysmal:
Q: I know you voted for lesser increases, and sometimes they were so much less, and our VA desperately needs the money. Can you tell me why you would vote for less money for the VA when there's a war going on?
M: Well of course I have not and I'm afraid I've been endorsed by the VFW in…
revere | October 21, 2008The New York Times has a very long article by Lawrence Altman, a physician and medical reporter for the newspaper, about the uncertainties regarding the medical histories of the four major party candidates for President and Vice-President. John McCain, a cancer survivor and the candidate who would become the oldest President were he elected, has intensified the interest by his choice of running mate, the inexperienced and probably unqualified Governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin. Joe Biden also has a major medical issue in his background (two berry aneurysms). There are sufficient unknowns about…
revere | October 20, 2008I'm not a fan of Colin Powell. He was there and helped start this catastrophic war. Maybe he tried to resist it in private but in public he shouldered the weight of selling it. He bears responsibility for it. He knew better but he was, as always, the good soldier. So now Powell has broken with his party (he is a longtime Republican and has served as an aparatchik in Republican administrations). He has endorsed Barack Obama for President. The usual suspects are already calling him a racist and a suggestion he is a secret Muslim can't be far behind.
I don't know if Powell's nod will have any…
revere | October 20, 2008Flu season is upon us and with it the perennial question, should I get a flu shot. In 2006 the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) extended its 2004 recommendation that children 6 months to 23 months be vaccinated (2 doses) to now include children 6 months to 59 months (<5 yyears old). I'm in a targeted group to get vaccinated (over 65 years) and my three grandchildren are in the targeted group for children (one will slide into the window during flu season). What do we know about the usefulness of getting vaccinated? It's been studied, but unfortunately the results are…
revere | October 19, 2008This hilarious invocation by an evangelical preacher at a McCain rally in Davenport, Iowa, October 11, 2008, has had plenty of exposure but I couldn't resist replaying its Fatuous Goodness one more time. The argument is that God is All Powerful, so He can make McCain win. But if He doesn't make McCain win, then anyone who prayed to Allah, "Hindu", Buddha, etc., for Obama to win will get the idea their God did the trick and the True God's rep will suffer. It doesn't make any logical sense. But would you expect it to? It's religion. It doesn't have to make sense:
revere | October 18, 2008The pundits keep telling us that a particular problem for Barack Obama are older, white Catholics. Like this woman?
Sister Cecilia has lived in the convent in Rome for 50 years.
A 106-year-old American nun living in a convent in Rome could well be one of the oldest voters to cast a ballot in the 2008 US Presidential election.
Sister Cecilia Gaudette, who last voted for President Eisenhower in 1952, has registered to vote and says she will vote for Democrat Barack Obama.
Although hard of hearing, she keeps herself informed by reading newspapers and watching TV at the convent.
"I'm encouraged…
revere | October 18, 2008Here's some public health man-bites-dog news. George Bush's Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) did something right:
The Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday set stringent new standards for airborne lead particles, following the recommendations of its science advisers and cutting the maximum allowable concentrations to a tenth of the previous standard. It was the first change in federal lead standards in three decades.
[snip]
The new standards set the limits for exposure at 0.15 micrograms per cubic meter of air, down from 1.5 micrograms, and well within the outer limit of 0.2…