revere | March 26, 2008The Reveres are crazy busy. So what do we do to keep this space from going dark? We put up posts like this one:
Identigene is selling at-home DNA testing kits for paternity testing at drugstores across the country. The $30 kit includes swabs for the child, mother, and "alleged father," consent forms, and a mailer to be sent back to the company. You'll also want to include a check--the lab fees are an additional $120. Results are available in 3-5 business days once the samples have been received.
Only $150 separates you from the truth about your child's paternity, although you'll have to pay…
revere | March 26, 2008Germany has been free of bird flu in poultry for three months. I predict they are about to have another outbreak. How do I know? Because every time I see something like this it's like a signal to whatever fickle gods control these things:
The German government declared on Tuesday the country is free of bird flu, with no cases of deadly H5N1 avian influenza discovered in wild birds or domestic poultry for the past three months.
According to German Agriculture Ministry, the last outbreak of bird flu was in poultry in rural areas west of Berlin in December.
Germany had its first brush with bird…
revere | March 25, 2008Of course the 4000th US combat death in Iraq is an artificial milestone. It's not different than the 10th or the 3999th or what will for certain be the 4010th, a human being in the prime of life who is alive now but won't be by the end of next week. But the number 4000 is a symbol that stands for the shredded lives, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, from a war started on purpose by a handful of American government officials.
We choose not to celebrate the lives of the 4000 soldier victims, or the lives of their enemies, or the lives of the uncounted innocent civilians…
revere | March 25, 2008We've covered the Indonesian refusal to cooperate with international influenza surveillance system to a fare thee well (see posts posts here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and links therein), so this is just an update with some additional observations how Indonesia's deplorable behavior isn't that different than the US's deplorable behavior in the Middle East. First, Indonesia. When last we checked in Indonesia had sent off half a dozen flu specimens from the period after the end of January 2007 when it started its boycott. The hope was that the…
revere | March 24, 2008The other day, as I was bemoaning the tanking of the dollar versus the Euro (yes, my European friends are not crying in their beer over it; I'm glad for them. Now they can visit), I mentioned that it wasn't just the dollar that had taken a bath since GWB but also the US reputation as a force for Good in the world. Now the BBC World Service has put some numbers on this in a survey of 26,000 people from 25 different countries:
As the United States government prepares to send a further 21,500 troops to Iraq, the survey reveals that three in four (73%) disapprove of how the US government has…
revere | March 24, 2008If you want to know what advances in public health and medicine in the last 150 years have done the most for the overall health of the community a major contender for the top spot would have to be the provision of safe and abundant drinking water. The first piped water supplies for major American cities date to shortly before the Civil War (mid nineteenth century) and disinfection with chlorine didn't start until the end of the first decade of the 20th century. The results for major waterborne infectious diseases like typhoid fever and various maladies just categorized as diarrhea and…
revere | March 23, 2008My children are no longer young. In fact they are old enough to have children of their own and when my daughter asked me if I thought her then 6 month old should get a flu shot I didn't hesitate: Absolutely, I said. And he did. Two of them, the required number. That was just before the flu season, which he has so far weathered just fine. Sadly that's not true for all children. The two most vulnerable groups for dying from influenza are children under 5 and the elderly (me). I got flu shots, too, although the evidence it will help me is not as good as the evidence my little grandson will be…
revere | March 23, 2008Some arguments against atheism just cannot be answered. Seriously.
Feel the Love! Not to mention the Peace and Joy. QED:
Speaking of Dawkins, the hilarious episode of PZ's expulsion from the screening of Ben Stein's Science Fiction movie, Expelled, is going viral on the net. Don't blame Stein, though. He's doing it for the children:
revere | March 22, 2008If you live in the US you know that the Fox News Network prides itself on being the Voice of the Fatherland, connotation intended. Fox and its sleazy news anchors are not only doggedly pro-Bush but doggedly Far Right and poorly concealed racists and nativists. I don't watch it (I take my daily shower before watching TV, so it would be inefficient), but I see clips and often think to myself, "How can these people live with themselves?" Have they no self-respect, no shame? Fox news anchor Chris Wallace, at least, has answered that for us. He, at least, does have his limits and a sense of shame…
revere | March 21, 2008They say politics makes strange bedfellows, so now that John McCain and Joe Lieberman are in bed together I hope they screw each other's brains out. John McCain may have sparked a little lover's spat yesterday when he encouraged Americans to go to Canada to buy lower priced drugs, something Joe Lieberman (the Senator from Big Pharma) looks on with horror. I sure don't object, but some McCain's other health care ideas strike me as politically suicidal (of course it also doesn't both me if he sends himself down the toilet, either):
John McCain is bolstering his reputation as a maverick by…
revere | March 21, 2008While we are all waiting for the other shoe to drop and a nasty, rip roaring flu pandemic to come rushing down the tracks at us, lots of companies have jumped into the pandemic vaccine sweepstakes. Reuters reports that at least 16 companies are testing flu vaccines and probably even more are involved in some technical aspect of vaccine production. That's good, although whether it will make any significant difference except around the margins remains to be seen. Timing is everything.
Meanwhile, though, work is going forward on many vaccine fronts. The one to hit the PR wires today is a report…
revere | March 20, 2008I eat a lot of salad. Not because I think they are healthy but because I like salads. When I go to lunch at the hospital cafeteria I usually eat from the salad bar, and believe me, that's not a pro-health measure. You'd know what I mean if you saw the salad bar. But green leafies are supposed to be good for us, too, so that's a bonus. But a new study from CDC suggests that they are not quite as healthy as they once were:
Over the past 35 years the proportion of foodborne outbreaks linked to the consumption of leafy green vegetables has substantially increased and that increase can not be…
revere | March 20, 2008I rarely report about suspected bird flu cases here, preferring to wait a couple of days to let things sort out. In the early years of this blog I did report about them in the course of time, experience and some reflection we have come to our present position. Besides, it's not necessary. There are plenty of reputable, reliable and thorough places in flublogia to get up to the minute news. Given all that, it isn't surprising we didn't say anything here about a couple of suspect imported cases in Toronto. In fact, like crof, I hadn't heard about them. Now, thanks the the denials streaming out…
revere | March 19, 2008I don't know whether to laugh or cry. A bit of each, I suppose. When I was a young man, traveling in Europe was great for Americans. For starters, everybody didn't hate us (thanks George!). For another, everything was cheap. The dollar was strong so the exchange rate favored us. Now the dollar is moribund and travel in Europe is becoming prohibitively expensive for Americans. And in some places the dollar isn't just moribund. It has already died:
The U.S. dollar's value is dropping so fast against the euro that small currency outlets in Amsterdam are turning away tourists seeking to sell…
revere | March 19, 2008The chief veterinary officer of the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reaffirmed what everyone paying attention already knows: the bird flu situation in Indonesia is critical. The archipelago nation is the fourth most populous country in the world fragmented geographically on 17,000 islands and politically by a disastrously decentralized government. Of its 31 provinces, FAO says 31 have reported infected poultry, and on some of the largest -- Java, Sumatra, Bali and southern Sulawesi -- it is endemic and solidly entrenched. There are an estimated 30 million poultry smallholdings in…
revere | March 18, 2008Ex-Governor of New York Eliot Spitzer made a critical mistake in his relations with a prostitute: he had sex with her. Sex is bad, at least in America. You'd think a politician would know better than almost anyone. You don't have sex with prostitutes. You take campaign money from them:
The Grocery Manufacturers Association, which represents food, beverage and consumer products companies, spent nearly $1.6 million in 2007 to lobby on food safety and other issues.
The trade group spent a little more than $1 million in the second half of 2007 to lobby the federal government, according to a…
revere | March 18, 2008Last week The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released a comprehensive pandemic flu guidance document for states, accompanying it with a web presentation, the first of three. I haven't seen the Web Seminar and only quickly perused the document, so I am commenting on the basis of a description in CIDRAP News, a reliable source. You can find the Web presentation and document at pandemicflu.gov. It is always best to see the original, so this is my take from a second hand source. Even so, I don't think our take is likely to be wildly off kilter (assuming you don't think we are…
revere | March 17, 2008Sometimes when I surf the net looking for things to write about I run across things I don't ordinarily write about but attract my attention because they are especially pertinent to my own health. Here's an example. I recently herniated a disk, for which I took fairly hefty doses of anti-inflammatories. Mostly it was extra strength aspirin but often it was horse doses of ibuprofen. I am also of the age that it makes sense to take low dose aspirin for its anti-platelet effects. There is good data to suggest this is a preventative for heart attack and stroke. Now it turns out I may have been…
revere | March 17, 2008There are all sorts of ways to prepare for an emergency. One is to simulate it inside a computer (a computer model). But you don't have to simulate inside a computer. You can also do it in "meatspace" (aka, the real world). Dungeons and Dragons using books is one example of this. Another is to do a pandemic version of D&D. It's called a table top exercise, although the size of the table can be pretty big. Recently our wiki partner, DemFromCT (if you can call someone a partner who does all the work), observed a CDC exercise which he has described in detail over at the FluWiki Forum (here,…
revere | March 16, 2008The headline seemed to say it all: "Funding Issues Stymie Pandemic Preparation." Right, I thought. All the money is going in to procurement, too little into shoring up a failing public health system. Little did I know:
The fear of bioterrorism and avian flu are driving a healthy new interest by biotech firms in developing products in the field of infectious diseases. "Even though we were developing a smallpox vaccine in 2000, there is no doubt that 9/11 was the moment that biodefense suddenly came up the funding ladder in the U.S.," said Clement Lewin, Ph.D., vp of marketing policy and…