revere | June 20, 2008This is the third (and last) post in our primer of the science of green house gases (see the first two here and here). Our objective is to explain what makes something a greenhouse gas. Why is CO2 a greenhouse gas and not O2 (oxygen) or N2 (nitrogen)? In the first two posts we set the table by explaining electromagnetic (EM) radiation, how we describe it and how it interacts (or doesn't interact) with matter. We pointed out that all physical bodies act like little transmitters of EM radiation and that they can also absorb EM radiation -- but only at the same wavelengths they emit it. Some…
revere | June 19, 2008In the first post in this primer series we discussed the nature of electromagnetic radiation. It is via EM radiation that the sun's energy reaches the earth and since it is the balance between the energy that reaches the earth and the energy that is radiated away from the earth that is at the center of the global warming problem, we need to get this part straight. So far we have only talked generally (and very superficially) about what EM radiation is and pointed out that it can carry energy from one point to another (e.g., from the sun to the earth and from the earth back out to surrounding…
revere | June 18, 2008Objection to the scientific basis of greenhouse warming seems to be the gift that keeps on giving. That is, if you like getting the same gift over and over again and returning it because it's defective never works. Still, hope springs eternal that understanding something about it will make the disagreements clearer. So this will be the first post about the underlying science. There will be more. It's a primer, so if you know the science it's not for you. But understanding what's under the hood can be explained without requiring agreement on global warming. On the grounds that learning about…
revere | June 17, 2008Since we don't do much health services posting around here I sometimes forget how terrific the blog Health Care Renewal is. It's always interesting. Sometimes it brushes against things we are concerned about here and last week there was a post with some good links about GlaxoSmithKline, a Big Pharma company active in influenza antivirals (Relenza) and pandemic vaccines. The companies of Big Pharma represent some of the most profitable on earth, making so much money that normal rates of profit, like what you might get from defense contracting, are considered failure. They justify their obscene…
revere | June 16, 2008Our post on what is behind the Right Wing attack on science drew a lot of attention and numerous comments. I'd like to emphasize some key points that may have gotten lost in the details (for the details, please see the original post). We'll use climate change skepticism as an example, but the principles hold for other kinds of assaults, for example, on public health concerns regarding bis phenol A.
The cardinal point is that the attacks aren't about science. Refuting false statements about whether CO2 is or is not a driver of global warming may seem (and be) necessary, but it is not the…
revere | June 15, 2008Of the many tag lines I've seen as part of people's electronic signatures, the most apt for this post is this one:
"I used to care about stuff. Now I have a pill for that."
Sergeant Christopher LeJeune was anxious and depressed after long duty on Baghdad's dangerous streets. He often had to collect enemy dead from houses he had attacked. Sometimes there were tiny shoes and toys scattered around. The whole package was starting to get to him. So the Army took care of his problem:
While the headline-grabbing weapons in this war have been high-tech wonders, like unmanned drones that drop…
revere | June 14, 2008Some readers are skeptical of global warming and we sometimes get hit and run types who want to declare the threat of a pandemic a hoax cooked up by Donald Rumsfeld to make money on Tamiflu. Since I want everyone to feel welcome here, this is for you guys:
petit pas from mapo_mapos on Vimeo
revere | June 13, 2008If you want to see what difference environmental protection enforcement makes, just go to eastern Europe or the former Soviet Union. Or China. In the 1970s the US led the world in cleaning its environment and was consolidating its gains with well-staffed, motivated federal and state environment agencies. But that was then. Last weekend the US Senate couldn't even manage a paltry 60 votes to stop a filibuster of a bipartisan and none too strong global warming bill. This kind of failure isn't new. The US slow motion fall in environmental leadership has been going on for decades. In the Bush…
revere | June 12, 2008Crof, over at H5N1, has an important piece on Indonesia that is worth thinking about. He observes something that lots of us haven't paid attention to: Indonesia hasn't been notifying the UN agency on animal health, the OIE, about bird flu outbreaks in poultry for almost two years:
Here is the very last post from Indonesia: OIE DAILY UPDATE ON AVIAN INFLUENZA SITUATION IN BIRDS. As you will see, the date is September 26, 2006. Since then, Indonesia has told the world nothing about its poultry panzootic.
Look at this map of B2B H5N1 outbreaks. Indonesia looks as clean as Argentina.
Look at this…
revere | June 11, 2008You know any post that starts out . . .
Gerardo Castillo, 30 years old, had worked at the Blommer Chocolate Co. for 9 years. His family wanted him to quite ever since an explosion in a roaster killed a fellow worker and injured another. He was fearful himself, but he stayed on . . .
is going to end badly. You'd be right. Continuing with our post . . .
But on the weekend, something terrible happened at Blommer's four story factory on Chicago's Near West Side, after an unnamed substance was added to a batch of chocolate resulting in a chemical reaction that produced ammonia or an ammonia-…
revere | June 10, 2008It was a sixties-style wedding, only 20 people including the Baptist minister and the bride and groom. I was there with my friend. The guests were all family except for three close friends of the couple and the officiating Minister, chosen because his church was rent-free home for innumerable political groups -- and he had consented not to mention God in the service. He did require the couple to attend some pre-marital counseling sessions, but the only thing the bride and groom could remember about them was that at one point he mentioned the wedding ring's circle was a symbol of endless love…
revere | June 9, 2008Last fall the animal slaughter giant Tyson Foods, Inc. was selling chickens with a USDA approved label, "raised without antibiotics." Some people thought that was a bit misleading insofar as Tyson routinely used ionophores in their feed designed to prevent a fungal disease in the birds. The USDA classes ionophores as antibiotics. The agency had "overlooked" the additive and when it was forcefully brought to their attention, they asked Tyson to add words to their label indicating it used no antibiotics that could cause antibiotic resistance in humans. Tyson added the words in December but…
revere | June 8, 2008The controversy over the health of rescue workers at the World Trade Center site goes on. The Wall Street area was re-opened quickly after 9/11 despite EPA air tests that showed hazardous materials in the air by direct orders from Condeleeza Rice's office when she was National Security advisor to George Bush. High asbestos levels were omitted from press releases because of "competing priorities," according to an article in the New York Post in September 2006 (long pull quotes in the post linked above but the new link has since been taken down). So political interference has already been…
revere | June 8, 2008We do a lot of Christian baiting here. Admittedly the tendency of many Christians to make lampooning easy is a factor. But we need to give other religions a chance, too. So we bring you now Richard Dawkins pwning an orthodox rabbi. What I particularly like about this is the way Dawkins highlights the fundamental wrongness of isolating and indoctrinating children in ways that separate them from the world and their fellow humans. If a cult is a social structure with a dictatorial leader who practices mind control, the rebbe presides over a cult. And also, in my view, commits child abuse:
revere | June 7, 2008Like most public health scientists I am fascinated by the complicated relationship between the environment and disease. You build a military base somewhere and sexually transmitted diseases follow. You build a dam in Egypt and urinary schistosomiasis, a chronic debilitating disease that also predisposes to bladder cancer, entrenches itself in an area because infected workers are attracted from far away endemic areas. They work and often urinate in the water, seeding the shallows of rivers and lakes with schistosome eggs. When the eggs get into the snails, they germinate, the schistosome…
revere | June 6, 2008The Indonesian Health Minister, Siti Fadilah Supari, has figured out how to deal with her country's reputation as being the bird flu capital of the world. She isn't going to announce deaths from the disease as they happen:
A 15-year-old girl died of bird flu last month, becoming Indonesia's 109th victim, but the government decided to keep the news quiet. It is part of a new policy aimed at improving the image of the nation hardest hit by the disease. Health Minister Siti Fadilah Supari said Thursday she will no longer announce deaths immediately after they are confirmed. But she promised to…
revere | June 5, 2008Does the Obama candidacy signal a return of "the sixties"? It's possible. What does that mean? Even those us who were there remember the sixties imperfectly. Not because we were permanently stoned. Memory is selective. We remember it as better than it was. We were young, and that makes a difference.Yet, as tristero observes over at Digby's place, the sixties were not just a time of flowering creativity and the securing of new freedoms, but also a terrible, difficult and dark time for anyone who had any political awareness.
The run-up to the sixties was in fact much like the last few years.…
revere | June 4, 2008What do the US states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Colorado, Kansas, Idaho, Illinois and Indiana have in common? They are locations of reported illnesses from Salmonella Saintpaul infections, forty in Texas and New Mexico alone, with 17 hospitalizations. Thirty more cases have been reported in the other seven states. The cases are connected by being genetically identical. S. saintpaul is a less common cause of human infection than other non typhoid Salmonella strains and the bugs isolated from these cases are said to be identical. This makes a common source the only reasonable…
revere | June 3, 2008Recently we noted the passing of Mildred Loving, whose Supreme Court case in the 1960s struck down the nation's anti-miscegenation laws. Mildred was black. Her husband Richard was white. It seems like such a distant event, although I was already in medical school when it happened. What hasn't died, yet, is irony (despite the Bush administration's valiant effort to snuff it out). Consider this:
Several leading child welfare groups Tuesday urged an overhaul of federal laws dealing with transracial adoption, arguing that black children in foster care are ill-served by a "colorblind" approach…