revere | August 9, 2008Recently a relative was sent home from the hospital with her own oxygen supply. It wasn't a cylinder of compressed oxygen but an oxygen concentrator, a device that takes room air and removes a lot of the nitrogen by passing the air through a zeolite canister. These devices can supply 50 - 95% oxygen. About 1 million people over the age of 65 are on home based Long Term Oxygen Therapy (LTOH) supported by Medicare. Many of them need oxygen because they have chronic lung disease brought on by their addiction to cigarettes (not the case for my relative, however). Cigarettes. Oxygen. Not a good…
revere | August 8, 2008I've been looking at the documents deposited online by the Department of Justice making their case against Dr.Bruce E. Ivins, the Army scientist they allege is the lone anthrax attack culprit. My perusal of their case leaves a mixed impression. If their portrayal of his mental condition is at all accurate - and it is difficult to judge on the basis of the highly selected quotes from emails and hearsay evidence of unnamed sources -- then Ivins certainly is a plausible suspect. Selected leaking of information, not all of it verified could also make him a convenient and plausible patsy. I have…
revere | August 7, 2008The anthrax story just gets weirder and weirder. More than weird, some of it reeks. A circumstantial public case first via media leaks and now via a press conference by the Justice Department is being built against Bruce Ivins, the Army scientist who reportedly committed suicide as federal prosecutors were closing in on him. Reporter Larissa Alexandrovna (at-Largely) has raised a number of significant questions about some of the sources, especially the supposed therapist Jean Duley who is the one who has accused Ivins of stalking her and alleging he was a homicidal maniac who had already…
revere | August 6, 2008A curious paper on the 1918 flu pandemic appeared this month in CDC's journal, Emerging Infectious Diseases. It seemed provocative, at least on the surface. It claimed that the conventional wisdom underlying pandemic flu preparations was wrong. It's not the flu virus we should be defending ourselves against but the common bugs of the upper respiratory tract that take advantage of new fertile ground to grow in after the flu virus invades:
Medical and scientific experts now agree that bacteria, not influenza viruses, were the greatest cause of death during the 1918 flu pandemic.
Government…
revere | August 5, 2008The Health Care Renewal blog has made a business of chronicling the undreside of the American health care system: fraud, conflicts of interest by respected academics, bureaucratic incompetence and malfeasance. I do basic research and don't get involved in health care delivery so I only refer to them occasionally, but it's a terrific resource -- if you like that kind of thing. Last week, however, they hit pretty close to home. Not literally, but professionally. I'm a cancer epidemiologist and in a long career have made frequent use of state cancer registries. If you don't know what a cancer…
revere | August 4, 2008The unfolding anthrax story may not unfold much because the government seems to be in a hurry to keep it folded. They claim -- not officially but through the news media -- to have found the nutjob who did it. He had opportunity, means and motive (he was a nutjob). Now he's dead and can't defend himself. Case closed. Maybe. But neither the news media nor the government who feeds them crapola have track records for credibility, so I'm not yet willing to lay this vicious homicide automatically on his grave. Yes, we are getting all sorts of leaked info but then we got a lot of leaked info when…
revere | August 3, 2008We have numerous examples of basic science that becomes unexpectedly useful and other examples of how veterinary science is useful to human health. Once you begin to understand how the world works it gives you tools that can be extended. The first stick used to knock a banana off a tree proved useful for lots of other things as well -- for example, whacking another monkey trying to poach on your personal banana patch (the Second Amendment of the Monkey Constitution gives all primates the Right to carry a club). So it's not such a big surprise that work on bird flu to save humans might have…
revere | August 3, 2008Birmingham, England is not a little country burg. The Greater Birmingham area has about a million people. It also has a city council to run the place and a computer web access monitoring system to help the people who run the people who run the place "control internet access." Not so unusual. Mrs. R. works in a state health department where they seem obsessed with preventing staff from accessing sites not related to work, although a lot of sites get blocked inappropriately because the filters are "stupid." She has had her access to CDC blocked on occasion because some word triggered a block (e…
revere | August 2, 2008A new article in the British scientific journal, The Lancet, suggests that seasonal influenza vaccines may not be effective in preventing community acquired pneumonia in people 65 years old and older. This is the group specially targeted by CDC for vaccination each year and, not coincidentally, an age group that includes me. So I have both a scientific and personal interest in the subject. This isn't new news. We've previously discussed the evidence that shows seasonal vaccines are less effective in the elderly a number of times (see here and here) over the last few years, but the proposition…
revere | August 1, 2008There's a mighty storm a brewin' in the occupational health world. It is always a marvel to us that no matter how jaded we think we are, there is always room for more indignation. It is the Bush administration's only form of renewable energy.
The issue first poked its head above water on July 8 when my colleague Celeste Monforton over at The Pump Handle noticed something suspicious on the website of the Office of Management and Budget's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA, pronounced oh-EYE-ra):
I found the most curious item on OMB OIRA's webpage today, and my paranoia about…
revere | July 31, 2008There's a tremendous amount of influenza A/H5N1 ("bird flu" virus) all over southeast asia and other areas where the virus is endemic in poultry. Where is this virus, exactly? We know it's in the infected birds and in their respiratory secretions and feces. We know it occasionally infects mammals (including humans). Is it found in the environment? We know very little about this, although there is good evidence it is in water where aquatic birds like ducks spend time and likely one way the virus is spread from bird to bird. In lab experiments, the virus remains intact on inanimate surfaces for…
revere | July 30, 2008The FDA is saying they still aren't sure how over 1200 Salmonella stpaul cases resulted from food chain contamination but they are saying its from jalapeno peppers grown in Mexico. This from a press release July 25:
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is advising consumers that jalapeño and Serrano peppers grown in the United States are not connected with the current Salmonella Saintpaul outbreak.
However, the FDA continues to advise consumers to avoid raw jalapeño peppers--and the food that contains them--if they have been grown, harvested or packed in Mexico.
[snip]
The more narrow…
revere | July 29, 2008If you read the comments you know that in the last day or so Mrs. R. and I have had the excitement and anxiety of expecting a new grandchild. He is number three but the only thing that gets old about being a grand parent is the grand parent. The little guy is cute as a button, the mom (our daughter) is resting comfortably after her C-section, dad is happy and snapping pics and wondering how he is going to cope on his own with the 14 month old sib until his spouse returns home and Mrs. R. and I are relieved and pleased as punch. While we, too, cope with events we bring you this:
Product…
revere | July 28, 2008As we noted two days ago in a post about how the produce industry is now interested in tracking regulations they previously opposed after being whacked with billions of dollars in losses because of a protracted Salmonella outbreak whose source was presumably produce but couldn't be easily traced, the sugar industry is now also interested in OSHA regulations for combustible dusts. All it took was the deaths of 13 workers at the Imperial Sugar Refinery in Savannah, Georgia. That and the thrid largest fine in OSHA history, $8.7 million. The facts suggest that the $8.7 million was a lot more…
revere | July 27, 2008The toughest time when losing something dear to you is the period after all the mourners go home and you feel really alone. But if you mourn the death of the Fourth Amendment, whether you are on the Right, the Left or are Unpolarized, you aren't alone -- yet:
revere | July 27, 2008Maybe it's my imagination, but the great desecration in cracker-gate died down more quickly than I would have imagined. That's some kind of internal imagining contradiction, I suppose, quite appropriate for talking about religious questions, which themselves seem to be endless sources of linguistic tangles. When it comes to linguistics, no better place than The Language Log, where I found a tiny disquisition on Good and Evil connected with a new word (for me), "to linquify":
We need a new term for what is going on; although I don't in general think you can only grasp concepts that you have…
revere | July 26, 2008We've been saying this for a while. The produce industry has taken a big hit and their successful lobbying is one of the reasons. But it's not just their fault. It's also the fault of the Bush administration:
One of the worst outbreaks of foodborne illness in the U.S. is teaching the food industry the truth of the adage, "Be careful what you wish for because you might get it."
The industry pressured the Bush administration years ago to limit the paperwork companies would have to keep to help U.S. health investigators quickly trace produce that sickens consumers, according to interviews and…
revere | July 25, 2008A tragedy in Massachusetts is highlighting the terrible strain the housing crisis is taking on millions of former homeowners who are losing their homes:
The housing crunch has caused anguish and anxiety for millions of Americans. For Carlene Balderrama, a 53-year-old wife and mother, the pressure was apparently too much to bear.
Police say that Balderrama shot herself Tuesday afternoon 90 minutes before her foreclosed home on Duffy Drive was scheduled to be sold at auction. Chief Raymond O'Berg said that Balderrama faxed a letter to her mortgage company at 2:30 p.m., telling them that "by the…
revere | July 24, 2008The headline said, "Vaccination plan puts health care workers first," but you had to read the article to find out who goes next: the military. This according to the Guidance on allocating and targeting pandemic influenza vaccine released yesterday by the US Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS). The guidance is premised on the assumption that in the early phases of a pandemic, any vaccine will be in short supply and will need to be rationed. The document gives "strong advice" on how DHHS thinks this rationing should take place, although much is left unexplained. Since the allocation…
revere | July 23, 2008Hurricane season is upon us (Hello, Dolly), so it's time to drag out the still heaving corpse of Hurricane Katrina. There was always this weird mismatch between Bush administration tales of how much aid was going to the victims and the pictures of forlorn, unaided and then outraged victims. Given the huge amount of federal aid, some may have thought that ungrateful. But what was "given" can be taken away by just moving a few decimal points:
Federal officials vastly overestimated the value of hurricane relief supplies given away earlier this year, the Federal Emergency Management Agency…