revere | August 26, 2008It's Presidential politics time, so here's something to think about: the threat to the health of women. In my early medical career I spent some time running down to emergency rooms to meet women bleeding out from botched illegal abortions. That wasn't so long ago, although most people have no idea what those days were like. I worry that under a McCain presidency they'll get a chance to find out. At the McCain Women's Clinic:
revere | August 25, 2008Both of our children and all three of our grandchildren were with us yesterday afternoon, which set me thinking about the Nebraska "safe haven" law. If you haven't heard about it, Nebraska has just joined the other 49 states by enacting LB 157, a law that allows a parent to abandon an unwanted child at a hospital, no questions asked. These kinds of laws are promoted by child welfare advocates as safeguards for newborns who might otherwise be left to die of exposure or deposited in the trash somewhere. It happens.
But Nebraska went all the way. Instead of a law like California's, which limits…
revere | August 24, 2008I belong to a number of professional societies and one of them is the American Mathematical Society. The September issue of one of their publications, the Notices, just arrived and I read with interest a statement by one of the world's most distinguished mathematicians, Brown University's David Mumford. While most members of the public have never heard of him, Mumford has been a famous in mathematical circles for many years, having received the Fields Medal in 1974 for his work in algebraic geometry. The Fields Medal is an extraordinary recognition, perhaps the most prestigious in mathematics…
revere | August 24, 2008Was John McCain really getting into the religious weeds when he announced "we are all Georgians" and noting that Georgia was "one of the first nations on earth to convert to Christianity...it's been part of the grand sweep that compromises Western civilization"? Or was it just an addled and clueless persona, yearning to breathe free? Here's what Mark Silk had to say about it over at Spiritual Politics, a blog from Trinity College on religion and the 2008 election:
But seriously, as long as we're choosing allies based on their priority in embracing Jesus, can I put in a good word for Armenia,…
revere | August 23, 2008There's a lot of concern about the environmental effects of drilling for oil off the US coast, but I don't buy it. Yes, I know it won't produce any meaningful amount of oil, ever, and no oil at all for years. But that's a technicality. Politically it's a compelling idea and even though it won't do any good, what's the harm? Drilling for oil in coastal marine environments is perfectly safe. Experts from the oil and gas industry have said this is true and who would know better?
In fact, who has more experience with oil on the high seas? These guys have been shipping oil on the world's oceans…
revere | August 22, 2008Yesterday was the 12th 22nd anniversary of an environmental catastrophe in Cameroon. On August 21, 1986 Lake Nyos in that West African country belched a huge load of carbon dioxide and suffocated 1700 people as they slept. Like its monoxygenated cousin carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide is "a colorless, odorless gas that can kill you in your sleep," as the marketing gurus of monoxide detector like to say, but it was true in spades on that fateful day 22 years ago. Carbon dioxide doesn't kill the same way as carbon monoxide, which binds tightly to the homoglobin in your blood, shutting out the…
revere | August 21, 2008Not many scientists were convinced the FBI had a solid science case against accused anthrax attacker Dr. Bruce Ivins. So the FBI held a telephone conference call between journalists and their scientific back-up to answer outstanding questions. Some questions were answered by promising the science would be submitted for peer review to the scientific literature but many others remain, some scientific but mostly about how the science fits in to what would have had to have been "evidence beyond a reasonable doubt" in what the FBI says would have been a death penalty case. An Editorial and…
revere | August 20, 2008Everyone seems to agree about one thing concerning Vice President Cheney's senior aide, F. Chase Hutto III. He never met an environmental regulation he didn't just hate and oppose on principle. According to the Washington Post he has been instrumental in keeping our air and water dirtier than it needs to be. Just another day at the office in the Bush administration. Now, in the waning days of the Bush Reich, they want to name him a high official in the Department of Energy where he will in charge of policies related to climate change. The foundation of the climate change debate is the science…
revere | August 19, 2008News reports that nonagenarians had robust antibodies against the 1918 flu strain were intriguing on several levels but I wasn't sure how many doors were still open to these being antibodies that developed in the years after 1918. After all, the 1918 subtype was H1N1 which circulated freely until the 1950s when it was displaced by the next pandemic strain, H2N2. H2N2 in turn was pushed aside by H3N2 in 1968. Then H1N1 returned in 1977 (some say it escaped from a Russian laboratory) and since then H3N2 and H1N1 have been co-circulating. Some years are predominantly H1N1, some predominantly…
revere | August 18, 2008Tropical Storm Fay is bearing down on Cuba and the Florida Keys as I write this and is on the cusp of hurricane strength winds. A new study from the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science just published in Geophysical Research Letters looks again at the contentious issue of whether a warmer globe means more or worse hurricanes. The proposition that global warming mean more and fiercer hurricanes is derived from large computer simulations that have relatively low resolution for local weather events like hurricanes. The computing power needed to get better…
revere | August 17, 2008A recent letter on the worldwide prevalence of head lice in CDC's journal Emerging Infectious Diseases made me nostalgic for the good old days when our two kids were in daycare (they are both adults with children of their own in daycare now). In particular, I got to thinking about the days when I was active as an officer in the American Public Health Association (APHA) and many years made the yearly trek to its large annual meeting. While it's a large meeting, usually over 10,000 with scientific and business sessions spread out over many hotels, there is usually one headquarters venue where…
revere | August 17, 2008There are some things that cannot be undone. You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. You can't put the genie back in the bottle. You can't flush the Holy Spirit once you have been Baptized. No, wait!
Belief in God symbolically evaporated when more than a hundred atheists were "de-baptized" with a blow dryer yesterday.
Organizers of the event in Westerville, described as a "coming out party" for atheists, agnostics and humanists, served root beer and crackers with peanut butter and honey to top off the late afternoon ceremony.
"Do you agree that the magical potency of today's ceremony…
revere | August 16, 2008One of the effects of high gas prices is to encourage people to use bicycles. This also includes the police, where some jurisdictions are taking cops out of cruisers and putting them on foot or on bikes. Bike police (and bicycle messengers, people who use their bikes in crowded urban areas to endanger pedestrians), spend much more time in the saddle than most, other than professional racers and bike fanatics. A new study in the Journal of Sexual Medicine says the continual pressure on thei perineum is causing genital numbness in males. The culprit seems to be the nose on the traditional bike…
revere | August 15, 2008A couple of days ago we discussed the murky questions surrounding the death of accused anthrax attacker Dr. Bruce Ivins. At the center of stipulating the cause and manner of death were the procedures for filling out the state of Maryland's death certificate by the medical examiner. Determining and recording the cause of death is important for many other things besides the circumstances surrounding the unexplained deaths of anthrax attackers. In the US you can't legally dispose of a body without a properly recorded death certificate and it's a document survivors use for all manner of other…
revere | August 14, 2008The headline was kind of strange: Doctor pays for 'letting polio out of hospital'. It sounded like a hospital doctor had negligently let an infectious polio case out into the community. But in fact the doctor was the hero of the story:
A Samundri Tehsil Headquarters Hospital child specialist, who spilled the beans of polio cases before the media, has been awarded suspension from service, Dawn learnt on Tuesday.
The district administration hastened to take the decision after the doctor informed journalists about the suspected cases of polio at Samundri's villages. (Dawn [Pakistan])
This sorry…
revere | August 13, 2008The Bush administration wants to slow walk worker protection regulations, even when required by law, through the use of additional layers of review by the Office of Management and Budget. We wrote about this recently here (and see Celeste Monforton's excellent work at The Pump Handle). But let's be fair. The Bush administration doesn't always want to slow up rule making. At least not when wealthy land developers or their cronies in federal agencies are concerned:
The Bush administration wants federal agencies to decide for themselves whether highways, dams, mines and other construction…
revere | August 12, 2008We've argued before that the US biodefense laboratory effort -- whose planning principle seems to be based on "more" -- was making us less safe, not more safe. Whatever else you say about the anthrax attacks, they are a perfect illustration of this. The weapon and the culprit(s) came directly from the US weapons labs. A case of blowback if there ever was one. But the Bush administration, undeterred, wants to keep building these facilities. The highest level of containment for working with the most dangerous agents for which there is no vaccine or cure (BSL4 labs) were four in number in 2002.…
revere | August 11, 2008Questions about the FBI's case against popping up like mushrooms after a rain. There are too many to address in just one post. Meryl Nass's site has cataloged a number of them and Glenn Greenwald's latest installment others. We've weighed in a couple of times (here and here) and now want to add some additional thoughts about the official version of how the alleged anthrax attacker, Dr. Bruce Ivins, died.
Dr. Ivins was found unconscious at his home and taken to a hospital, where he died three days later. We don't know if he ever regained consciousness. Let's assume he didn't. There was no…
revere | August 10, 2008There are 163 days left in the Bush administration and we can hope that there are that number -- or less -- left in the Gerberding era at CDC. Julie Gerberding is the CDC Director and her abrasive, brutal and incompetent management style have taken the agency that was the jewel in the crown of federal public health and made it into a second rate, muscle-bound bureaucracy. The CDC-Gerberding slide has been going on for a long time and we have talked about it often here, almost from the start of this blog in 2004. Even though she is presumably in the final months of her tenure (she's a…
revere | August 10, 2008It's really hard to know what to say about the following clip. As a doctor I am appalled by it. It is the kind of preaching that leads to tragedy. It might seem like an extreme case, but I don't think it is. It shows a preacher telling his congregation doctors and medicine won't do them any good, only do them harm. He doesn't hold out the promise God will heal them. He instead promotes a passive fatalism implicit in the idea of a God that is all powerful and all wise and everything happens according to his plan. Including your cancer and your death. End of story.
Well, not exactly the end.…