revere | April 6, 2008About a month ago (March 1, 2008) we brought you the story of how a highly reputable and knowledgeable scientist, Dr. Deborah Rice of the Maine Department of Maine Department of Health and Human Services, was bonced off of an EPA scientific advisory committee because the chemical industry trade group, the American Chemistry Council (ACC), objected that she had a bias. How did they know? Dr. Rice, as part of her duties as toxicologist for the State of Maine, testified before its legislature that on the basis of a review of the scientific evidence she believed the deca congener of the…
revere | April 6, 2008When Mrs. R. saw the Vatican for the first and only time -- as a lapsed Catholic the place had some kind mysterious attraction for her, almost like the swallows and Capistrano except that one trip was enough in her case -- she was aghast and repelled by the ostentatious display of such immense wealth when so many of its adherents were in poverty. Where did it all come from? For that matter how about the huge amount of money flowing from diaspora Jews to Israel? In each case the money is given purely on the basis of religious identity, another form of tribalism. Make no mistake, tribalism --…
revere | April 5, 2008Since this piece in Wired referenced an email with a date of April 1 I was pretty sure this was an April Fool's joke. But the joke was on me. It's was for real:
A U.S. government-funded medical information site that bills itself as the world's largest database on reproductive health has quietly begun to block searches on the word "abortion," concealing nearly 25,000 search results.
Called Popline, the search site is run by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Maryland. It's funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, the federal office in charge of…
revere | April 4, 2008The Global War on Terror is claiming yet another victim: the reputation of Attorney General Michael Mukasey as a principled guardian of the Rule of Law. Even before joining the Bush administration Mukasey was forgetting the meaning of the word "torture," and since being confirmed is equally benighted regarding privacy. Now he is peddling shoddy goods linking terrorism and software piracy. Does this former judge have no shame? Via Preston Gralla at Computer World Blogs:
In a talk last week before at the Tech Museum of Innovation, Mukasey used his best fearmongering tactics to link software…
revere | April 4, 2008One of the least talked about problems in pandemic preparedness planning is that even if there is flu all around us and the health care system is struggling (and almost certainly failing) to handle the resulting demand of patients, people will still be getting sick from the usual things (heart attacks, strokes, etc.), having accidents, and yes, getting pregnant.
There is pretty good reason to think that getting the flu when pregnant is even worse than getting the flu otherwise. A pregnant woman's immune system reacts differently because of the special circumstance of accommodating the…
revere | April 3, 2008After 2,629 days of George W. Bush in office, it's a little comforting for Americans to know our country doesn't have a monopoly on sheer stupidity. We now give officials in New Zealand their well earned share of the World's Biggest Morons Award (hat tip Boingboing):
Passengers on an Air New Zealand flight from Fiji found themselves being fumigated yesterday after it was discovered that the aircraft's biosecurity clearance had expired.
An Auckland man - who spoke to the Herald on condition of anonymity - said two Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry officers boarded NZ21 from Nadi at…
revere | April 3, 2008The index case was a 5 year old Miniature Schnauzer with 5 days of nasal discharge and sneezing. The dog recovered but the next case, a 3 year old Cocker Spaniel wasn't so lucky, nor were the 2 Korean hunting dogs (Jindos) or a 3 year old Yorkshire terrier. Then 13 dogs in a shelter started to show signs of nasal discharge, cough and high fever. Antibody studies showed that they had all been suffering from influenza infection, subtype H3N2. These cases happened in the spring and summer of 2007 (NB: this is not flu season). H3N2 is the most common subtype involved in human seasonal influenza.…
revere | April 2, 2008The World Wide Web began at the Swiss nuclear research facility, CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), and that may be its biggest claim to fame. But CERN really is a nuclear research facility and is home to some of the most advanced technologies for probing the inner workings of matter, especially sub-atomic particles. For example, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is located there. Hadrons are composite subatomic particles composed of quarks. They come in two flavors, baryons (three quarks) and Mesons (a quark and an anti-quark). We learn in Wikipedia that hadrons are "single…
revere | April 2, 2008If a worker refused to report for work because it was a demonstrably dangerous workplace they would be within their rights, with a few exceptions. One of the exceptions in some states seems to be health care workers (HCW) who refuse to work during a pandemic. A HCW, like any other worker, might not report for work for a variety of reasons: fear for their own safety, fear for the safety of their families should they bring home an infectious disease like influenza, need to care for their family if one is sick or has not caretaker (say, because the schools are closed). In at least two states,…
revere | April 1, 2008If the Osama bin Laden Foundation or the Adoph Hitler Memorial Fund offered to support your scientific research -- no strings attached -- would you take the money? Remember, you are hoping to do good with your work, say, investigate a new cancer drug or a model of the cardiovascular system. Pure science but with possibly beneficial applications. And the funders delivered the money and never interfered. Not once. Would you be willing to get in bed with these guys, just to that extent? Probably most US scientists today wouldn't. Probably. But the Boston Globe reported yesterday and the New…
revere | April 1, 2008If you were infected with seasonal influenza virus, how long before you start having symptoms (the incubation period)? How about how long before you start shedding virus so that you can infect others (the latent period)? When are you most infectious? Expert opinion. based on experience and the scientific literature, says that the incubation period is about 2 days but you might start shedding virus after only a day, i.e., before you get any symptoms. You are most infectious on day 2 of your illness. But will everyone who is infected really "come down with" the flu? We know that a good…
revere | March 31, 2008Record and movie companies want to turn file sharing into a moral issue -- I think there are some moral issues here, although they fall on both sides -- but in reality everyone knows it's just about money and the fact that they have their hands on the levers of the legal system which they use for their benefit. It's not about justice. They recover money from teenies and grandmas and then don't redistribute it to the artists. In fact they have a long history of cheating artists. And now they have been caught again with their hands in the cookie jar.
I found this on Slashdot but the original…
revere | March 31, 2008Trust is not transitive, as someone recently pointed out, when reporting on the airline pilot who carried a gun into the cockpit and then accidentally or negligently discharged it and blew a hole in the plane. We had every reason to trust the pilot to be able to fly a 747, but not necessarily to handle a firearm properly. Trust isn't transitive.
There is no doubt that Yi Guan, a professor at the University of Hong Kong, is an expert on H5N1 virus, its genetic lineages and surveillance for the virus in wild birds. He has reportedly screened, via cloacal swabs and fecal specimens, more than…
revere | March 30, 2008Homeland security is a priority for the Bush administration. I know that because they keep telling us. We have to take off our shoes and take out our identification getting on and off planes. Not just any identification, either. Official stuff. And crossing borders -- any borders, even the border from Canada -- now requires a passport. A passport! Perhaps one of the most highly prized and secure of all official forms of identification, too, now embedded with electronic chips. Even blank passports are expensive, and we are charged for them -- $100, up from $60 ten years ago. Which makes…
revere | March 30, 2008Let's face it. The US education system sucks. The public school system was a great historical achievement, producing high literacy rates, but in the 21st century the US is increasingly at a competitive disadvantage compared to other industrial nations. Instead of investing more we are investing less while promoting privatization, a recipe for mediocrity. This is seen most clearly in . . . anyone? what kind of eduction? . . . science education, where false ideas like . . . anyone? anyone? . . . evolution are rammed down the throats of helpless students, producing . . . anyone? faithless what…
revere | March 29, 2008If you are so paranoid you have trouble sleeping, the Quantum Sleeper is just the thing for you. It's a bed made to protect you from biological and chemical terrorist attacks, natural disasters (tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, earthquakes), kidnappers/stalkers and features bulletproof "saferoom" protection (hat tip Boingboing).
The basic Quantum Sleeper unit consists of an aluminum bed frame and headboard with polycarbonate, bullet proof plating that is designed to provide a protective barrier (shielding) between a perpetrator or environmental condition and the homeowners or occupants.
The…
revere | March 28, 2008I sometimes wonder if ordinary people in Texas are as stupid as many of the leaders they elect, but the evidence is that most aren't. Take the west Texas jury who heard case of Tim Stevens of Amarillo, 53 years old, and suffering from HIV/AIDS. He also had a cyclical vomiting syndrome, for which he treated himself with a toke here or there from some inhalable Mary Jane. So who cares? Some asshole who notified police after they saw Stevens share a joint on a friend's porch. They nabbed him with a twelfth of an ounce of marijuana and he was charged with a Class B misdemeanor, with a possible 6…
revere | March 28, 2008Hard on the heels of my semi-facetious prediction that bird flu would return to Germany because Germany had declared itself bird flu free, the Swiss announced an infected wild duck on the shores of Lake Sempach. Since this duck didn't have a passport on him I am sure he never strayed over the nearby border with Germany. We don't know what kind of duck this was [see update, below], a question that is of surprising interest in light of a new paper.
Bird flu is avian influenza, i.e., an infection of birds by the influenza virus. The role of wild migratory birds versus human caused movement of…
revere | March 27, 2008I've eaten beef jerky on occasion and rather liked its spiciness. I'm not an aficionado, however, and didn't know much about it. I did look at the Wikipedia article on beef jerky where you will find more than any sane person would want to know about the food aspects of the subject, but with the increasing concern about food safety and particularly the safety of the meat supply in the US and elsewhere I was curious about it from the public health perspective.
For those who don't know, here's the wikipedia description:
Jerky is meat that has been cut into strips trimmed of fat, marinated in a…
revere | March 27, 2008Bird flu is a viral disease but its effects go beyond viral infection. An obvious but important fact. Consider Egypt.
The first poultry cases in Egypt were only a little over two years ago, but the virus quickly took root there. The poultry infections were a harbinger of human infections, 18 that year (2006), 25 the next year, 4 so far this yar. Egypt now has more human cases of the disease than any other country outside of Asia (47 cases, 20 deaths). Like other countries with bird flu problems they also have a large population who lives in close contact with birds. Many people keep poultry…