revere | July 22, 2008This is the first, and I hope the last, time I come anywhere near defending Republican Presidential candidate John McCain, but I want to make a more general point so I'll swallow hard and do it. This is about his supposed gaffe wherein he seems to think Iraq and Pakistan share a border:
D[iane] S[awyer]: Do you agree the situation in Afghanistan is precarious and urgent?
J[ohn] M[cCain]: Well, I think it's very serious. I mean, it's a serious situation.
DS: Not precarious and urgent?
JM: Oh I- I don't- know wha- exactly whether- we can run through the vocabulary, but it's a very-
it's a ((v…
revere | July 22, 2008The tomatoes-peppers-cilantro-? Salmonella story is starting to break, although which way is hard to say at this moment. Beginning about 3 pm yesterday afternoon newswire stories began to report that the FDA had found a single jalapeno pepper in a small distribution center in McAllen, Texas, contaminated with the same uncommon Salmonella serovar (S. stpaul) implicated in a large outbreak that has infected over 1200 people in 43 states. This is the first time any food item has turned up positive for this Salmonella strain in the 14 weeks federal and state authorities have been trying to nail…
revere | July 21, 2008Lots of bloggers follow HIV/AIDS, although we haven't. Maybe because it's no longer an automatic death sentence, it has fallen off the public radar screen, but not because it isn't a huge public health problem. Just how big a problem seems to be a matter of some sensitivity for the Bush administration:
Since the fall of last year, rumors have been circulating that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will release revised statistics indicating that the number of people with new HIV infections living with HIV in the United States is actually higher than previously reported. Some…
revere | July 20, 2008The US FDA is lifting the warning on eating tomatoes it issued on June 7 because of the country's largest produce-associated foodborne Salmonella outbreak. The source of the Salmonella infections, all said to be "genetically identical" isolates of an uncommon serovar is still to be discovered, although epidemiological evidence associated it with salsa containing fresh tomatoes. Later the possibility that other salsa ingredients such as jalapeno peppers or cilantro might be the culprit has been raised. So far no one seems to know how that thousand plus cases became infected with the Salmonella…
revere | July 20, 2008I ran across this on a linguistics blog. Their interest was in the origin of the phrases, "Blackjack. No tagbacks" in the last panel. The consensus was it refers to school yard games where you can't turn around and just tag the tagger in a game of tag. It makes sense in this context. And it's the only thing in the three panels that does make sense. Because if you think through what's being said here, it is the "first mover" argument, so beloved of creationists, flipped on its head and applied to an anthropocentric and anthropomorphic God:
I put it to you: if there were no people, then where…
revere | July 19, 2008About a year and half ago, in a post entitled "One donut, black", I noted the claim of a food company that it would soon be able to sell donuts spiked with caffeine. I wasn't sure I would ever see such a thing, but I was too skeptical. Not only is that company still on track with its product, but another company has now announced its intention to put caffeine into bakery goods. All for our benefit, of course:
After announcing the development of a proprietary way to encapsulate caffeine for foods using vegetable-derived lipids last year, the company has worked in collaboration with bakery…
revere | July 18, 2008If you make a ranked list among developed nations on how well the US is doing in health care, we are towards the top of the list. If you hold the list upside down:
Americans live shorter lives than citizens of almost every other developed nation, according to a report from several US charities.
The report found that the US ranked 42nd in the world for life expectancy despite spending more on health care per person than any other country.
Overall, the American Human Development Report ranked the world's richest country 12th for human development.
The study looked at US government data on…
revere | July 17, 2008Hand, Foot and Mouth Disease (HFMD, not to be confused with a disease of cattle, Foot and Mouth Disease) is the result of an infection by one of several intestinal viruses, the most common being Coxsackie A and Enterovirus 71 (Ev71). HFMD is a fairly common contagious infection of infants and children that often appears in outbreak form in schools and daycare centers. Children with HFMD have fever, sore throat and characteristic lesions around the mouth and in the throat. Recently some very sizable outbreaks caused by Ev71 have been reported in China, Singapore and Mongolia, with thousands of…
revere | July 16, 2008A recent news article by Helen Branswell of Canadian Press ("Wait an hour to swim after eating? Says who?") contained two pieces of information, one that surprised me and one that didn't. Branswell was writing about the well worn safety advice to wait at least an hour after eating before going in swimming. This was a rule I remember as far back as I remember anything about what I was told about water safety. She points out that no one seems to know the basis of the alleged fact that to do otherwise courts the risk of developing muscle cramps that could lead to drowning. The theory, as I…
revere | July 15, 2008What's a little sodium dichromate, anyway? So it's a known human carcinogen and can do a lot of other nasty things. No big deal. Not for Iraq war contractor, KBR, anyway. At the time KBR was a subsidiary of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld's Vice President Dick Cheney's former company, Halliburton. So when they were given a lucrative contract to clean up and safeguard Iraqi oilfields after the Bush Mission was Accomplished in 2003, they told the soldiers and workers that the chemical, used as an antirust agent and then strewn all over the oil facilities, was a "mild irritant." Later they admitted…
revere | July 14, 2008CDC has discovered a new way a bird can cause bird flu: its own incompetence:
A laboratory building that contains a deadly strain of avian flu and other germs is among four that lost power for more than an hour Friday when a backup generator system failed again at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (Alison Young, Atlanta Journal Constitution)
The outage was due to a bird causing a Georgia Power transformer to fail.
As Tom Skinner, CDC spokesperson/flack points out, power outages happen and at a complex campus like CDC's they are unavoidable. Powered systems are not the only…
revere | July 13, 2008Cluster bombs are designed to do just one thing: kill people. It doesn't matter if the people are soldiers or not. In fact cluster bombs kill more civilians than they kill combatants. These diabolical weapons (I can't think of a better word) are not just one bomb but hundreds of little bomblets, each a small grenade, that scatter over a wide area and then explode. Or not. And that's the problem. Unexploded ordinance that later explode when disturbed by a farmer's plow, a child playing in the field or a family's valuable livestock. The civilized world wants to ban cluster bombs. The United…
revere | July 13, 2008There are days when it is agony to read the news, because people are so goddamned stupid. Petty and stupid. Hateful and stupid. Just plain stupid. And nothing makes them stupider than religion. (Pharyngula)
And there are days when it is agony to have to defend a Scibling on the flimsy grounds that, well, he's right, isn't he? PZ Myers at Pharyngula has raised the predictable shit storm by expressing appropriate outrage at the Christian Taliban's (Florida division) attempt to ruin the life (and limb) of a University of Central Florida student who didn't let a communion wafer dissolve in his…
revere | July 12, 2008We've had occasion to discuss the boondoggle, Project Bioshield a number of times (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here). Maybe I should have said, quite a number of times. REally, though, it's hardly worth mentioning. Via the Clinician's Biosecurity Briefing, this:
The Project BioShield Act, passed in 2004, gives HHS "authorities to expedite research, development, acquisition, and availability of priority medical countermeasures for public health emergencies caused by terrorist attacks." This Congressionally mandated report covers progress on the uses of those authorities for the…
revere | July 11, 2008Melanie Mattson was one of the founding Editors of the FluWiki, its initial "public face," the official publisher, and our colleague. More importantly she was our friend. We are grieved to announce her unexpected death.
On her blog, Just a Bump in the Beltway, Melanie was among the first on the internet to understand and write about the significance of reported human cases of avian influenza as a potential harbinger of a pandemic. She joined forces with us to start the FluWiki in June 2005 where she was a dedicated and innovative practitioner of a new medium, collective information generation…
revere | July 11, 2008Most academic scientists -- including me and my colleagues -- don't want unnecessary federal interference with what we do. We're like any regulated community. Not happy to be regulated. Unfortunately we have made the unnecessary necessary by allowing improper conflicts of interest to infest academic medicine and predictably, Congress is about to step in.
Until now, the academic response to periodic external scrutiny of potential research conflicts has been increasingly to assert that it can police itself. In 2001, the Association of American Medical Colleges issued recommendations for strong…
revere | July 10, 2008I always cringe when I see headlines that say, "Whatever happened to bird flu?" Usually what comes next is a recital of other "scares" that never materialized, the poster child being Y2K (although it has been strongly argued that the reason Y2K didn't happen was precisely because the business world prevented it with a sustained and intense effort). The article in question, however, just appearing in Nature magazine, still the world's pre-eminent science journal, is authored by one of Nature's senior correspondents, Declan Butler, the same journalist writing in the same journal who helped put…
revere | July 9, 2008While CDC and FDA struggle to figure out where the Salmonella saintpaul in a large multistate outbreak is coming from they are not being forthcoming about where it has gone. We know the case total but not much about who is getting sick, where and when. There is no good scientific or privacy reason not to release more information. It's just the usual tendency to keep control. But some of the information is "out there" anyway, in news reports and other sources of information. People interested in disease outbreaks discovered years ago that this information could be harvested and disseminated to…
revere | July 8, 2008The FDA and CDC still don't know the origin of the massive Salmonella outbreak, now extending to 40 states. They have lots of reasons, and under current conditions it's not an easy problem since the production channels for things like tomatoes are labyrinthine. There's lots of mixing, matching, diverting, and who knows what else going on as a tomato goes from a farm or hothouse to your table or local salad bar. We know this because FDA and CDC have been telling us so as explanation for why they still don't know where a single clone of Salmnella saintpaul has managed to infect almost 1000…
revere | July 7, 2008So Roche Pharmaceuticals now has sufficient productive capacity to make their influenza antiviral Tamiflu (oseltamivir) meet demand. More than enough, it appears, since they now have come up with a new scheme to unload some of their inventory before its 3 year shelf life expires and to keep turning over the inventory year after year, whether or not there is a demand in any particular year:
With an endorsement from US health officials, Roche, maker of the antiviral drug oseltamivir (Tamiflu), today unveiled a program to encourage more businesses to stockpile the drug to protect employees in…